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341Autonomy and privacy in Wittgenstein and BeckettPhilosophy and Literature 27 (1): 164-187. 2003.No abstract available.
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64Propositions as Made of WordsErkenntnis 89 (2): 591-606. 2022.I argue that the principal roles standardly envisaged for abstract propositions can be discharged to the sentences themselves (and similarly for the meanings or senses of words). I discuss: (1) Cognitive Value: Hesperus-Phosphorus; (2) Indirect Sense and Propositional Attitudes; (3) the Paradox of Analysis; (4) the Picture Theory of the Tractatus; (5) Syntactical Diagrams and Meaning; (6) Quantifying-in. (7) Patterns of Use. I end with comparisons with related views of the territory.
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9Quine and the Kantian Problem of ObjectivityIn Robert Sinclair (ed.), Science and Sensibilia by W. V. Quine: The 1980 Immanuel Kant Lectures, Palgrave Macmillan. 2019.Did Quine respond to the Kant-like question of what makes objectivity possible? And if so, what was his answer? I think Quine did have an answer, which is in fact a central theme in his philosophy. For his epistemology was not concerned with the question whether we have knowledge of the external world. His philosophy takes for granted that physics provides the most fundamental account of reality that we have. And like many positivists including Carnap, he takes that sort of question to have a fu…Read more
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420Trust and the appreciation of artRatio 35 (2): 133-145. 2021.Does trust play a significant role in the appreciation of art? If so, how does it operate? We argue that it does, and that the mechanics of trust operate both at a general and a particular level. After outlining the general notion of ‘art-trust’—the notion sketched is consistent with most notions of trust on the market—and considering certain objections to the model proposed, we consider specific examples to show in some detail that the experience of works of art, and the attribution of art-rele…Read more
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Wittgenstein and Other Philosophers: His Influence on Historical and Contemporary Analytic Philosophers (Volume II) (edited book)Routledge. forthcoming.This edited volume includes 49 Chapters, each of which discusses the influence of a philosopher's reading of Wittgenstein in his/her philosophical works and the way such Wittgensteinian ideas have manifested themselves in those works.
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1Wittgenstein and Other Philosophers: His Influence on Historical and Contemporary Analytic Philosophers (Volume I) (edited book)Routledge. forthcoming.This edited volume includes 36 Chapters, each of which discusses the influence of a philosopher's reading of Wittgenstein in his/her philosophical works and the way such Wittgensteinian ideas have manifested themselves in those works.
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46Observation Sentences RevisitedMind 131 (523): 805-825. 2021.I argue for an alternative to Quine’s conception of observation sentences, one that better satisfies the roles Quine envisages for them, and that otherwise respects Quinean constraints. After reviewing a certain predicament Quine got into in balancing the needs of the intersubjectivity of observation sentences with his notion of the stimulus meaning of an observation sentence, I push for replacing the latter with what I call the ‘stimulus field’ of an observation sentence, a notion that remains …Read more
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18Significance of the New Logic, by W. V. QuineMind 129 (516): 1320-1327. 2020.In 1942, before his duties began in the USA Navy, W.V. Quine lectured at the Free School of Sociology and Politics of São Paulo. He wrote up the lectures in Por.
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292The Artistic Expression of FeelingPhilosophia 49 (1): 315-332. 2020.In the past 60 years or so, the philosophical subject of artistic expression has generally been handled as an inquiry into the artistic expression of emotion. In my view this has led to a distortion of the relevant territory, to the artistic expression of feeling’s too often being overlooked. I explicate the emotion-feeling distinction in modern terms, and urge that the expression of feeling is too central to be waived off as outside the proper philosophical subject of artistic expression. Restr…Read more
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95Critical Thinking: A Concise Guide. 5th EditionRoutledge. 2019.Now with Venn Diagrams, expanded Extended Examples (nice work, Robert), and the latest trends in Rhetoric, post-truth etc. (nice work, Tracy).
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34In Favor of the Classical Quine on OntologyCanadian Journal of Philosophy 50 (2): 223-237. 2020.I make a Quinean case that Quine’s ontological relativity marked a wrong turn in his philosophy, that his fundamental commitments point toward the classical view of ontology that was worked out in most detail in hisWord and Object. This removes the impetus toward structuralism in his later philosophy.
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66Samesaying, propositions and radical interpretationRatio 14 (2). 2001.Davidson's paratactic account of indirect quotation preserves the apparent relational structure of indirect speech but without assuming, in the Fregean manner, that the thing said by a sayer is a proposition. I argue that this is a mistake. As has been recognised by some critics, Davidson's account suffers from analytical shortcomings which can be overcome by redeploying the paratactic strategy as a means of referring to propositions. I offer a quick and comprehensive survey of these difficultie…Read more
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40On Looking through Wollheim’s Bifocals: Depiction, Twofolded Seeing and the Trompe-l’œilBritish Journal of Aesthetics 58 (4): 435-447. 2018.Richard Wollheim was hardly alone in supposing that his account of pictorial depiction implies that a trompe-l’œil is not a depiction. I recommend removing this apparent implication by inserting a Kant-style version of aspect-perception into his account. I characterize the result as Neo-Wollheimian and retain the centrality of Wollheim’s notion of twofoldedness in the theory of depiction, but I demote it to a contingent feature of depictions and I criticize his employment of it for determining t…Read more
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25Quine, Publicity, and Pre-Established HarmonyProtoSociology 34 59-72. 2017.‘Linguistic meaning must be public’ – for Quine, here is not a statement to rest with, whether it be reckoned true or reckoned false. It calls for explication. When we do, using Quine’s words to piece together what he thought, we find that much too much is concealed by the original statement. Yes, Quine said ‘Language is a social art’; yes, he accepts behaviourism so far as linguistic meaning is concerned; yes, he broadly agrees with Wittgenstein’s anti-privacy stricture. But precisely what is b…Read more
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61The Reference Book. By John Hawthorne and David ManleyPhilosophical Quarterly 63 (253): 827-830. 2013.© 2013 The Editors of The Philosophical QuarterlyMany moons ago, Bertrand Russell thought of reference in epistemic terms: to mean an object—to refer to it—one had to be acquainted with it; for it is ‘scarcely conceivable’ that one should judge without knowing what one is judging about. The rest of the relation between language and the world is conceived as denoting, a feature of linguistic expressions and bits of the world which crucially holds or fails to hold without affecting the reference o…Read more
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20The unity of the proposition in the later WittgensteinConceptus: Zeitschrift Fur Philosophie 96. 2010.
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95II—Hyperintensional Truth ConditionsAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 88 (1): 57-68. 2014.A response to certain parts of Rumfitt : I defend Davidson's project in semantics, suggest that Rumfitt's use of sentential quantification renders his definition of truth needlessly elaborate, and pose a question for Rumfitt's handling of the strengthened Liar.
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14Is Everything a Set? Quine and PythagoreanismThe Monist 100 (2): 155-166. 2017.The view, in Quine, that all there are are pure sets is presented and endorsed.
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44Quine, by Peter HyltonMind 119 (475): 794-798. 2010.(No abstract is available for this citation)
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32'Confessions of a Confirmed Extensionalist and Other Essays'; and'Quine in Dialogue'by WV QuineNotre Dame Philosophical Reviews. forthcoming.
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31Critical Thinking. A Concise GuideRevue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 194 (1): 128-128. 2001.
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43Quine and His Place in History (edited book)Palgrave. 2014.Containing three previously unpublished papers by W.V. Quine as well as historical, exegetical, and critical papers by several leading Quine scholars including Hylton, Ebbs, and Ben-Menahem, this volume aims to remedy the comparative lack of historical investigation of Quine and his philosophical context.
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50Review of W. V. Quine, Confessions of a Confirmed Extensionalist and Other Essays; and, Quine in Dialogue (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2009 (4). 2009.
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Glock’s book is about evenly divided between Quine and Davidson. The central claims are (i) that they are best studied in conjunction; (ii) that they ‘can profitably be seen as logical pragmatists’ (meaning primarily that they view language as action that can be understood or clarified by means of formal logic); (iii) that they ‘combine profound insights with serious distortions’; and (iv) that their respective attempts to ‘accommodate higher phenomena such as meaning and thought within a natura…Read more
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28Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust (review)Philosophy and Literature 29 (2): 498-500. 2005.Landy’s book (OUP 2004; 255 pp.+ x) delivers what has gone long and scandalously missing: a philosophical analysis of Proust’s incomparable book that is muscular, concise, philosophically informed and sophisticated; logically rigorous, explanatorily fruitful, and meticulously answerable to its data, namely the text. The philosophy here is not, as often the case in writing about Proust, mere rhetoric or window-dressing, but substantive and literally believable. The book should for a long time be …Read more
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