•  105
  •  97
    Descartes' Wax: Discovering the Nature of Mind
    History of Philosophy Quarterly 12 (2). 1995.
    Descartes' procedure in "Meditation II" must be brought into line with his claim that "we must never ask about the existence of anything until we first understand its essence." And Descartes' "Meditation III" claim that he is aware of his mind's power to cause ideas must be grounded in a prior discovery of this power. Both demands are met by reading "Meditation II" as a progressive clarification of the nature of mind, with the investigation of the wax providing the discovery of the mind's genera…Read more
  •  73
    Naturalism: A Critical Appraisal (edited book)
    with Richard Wagner
    University of Notre Dame Press. 1993.
    Naturalism - the thesis that all facts are natural facts, that is the facts that can be recognised and explained by a natural science - plays a central role in contemporary analytical philosophy. Yet many philosophers reject the claims of naturalism. The essays in this anthology explore the difficulties of naturalism by revealing the ambiguities surrounding it, as well as the tensions that exist among its critics.
  •  52
    The rationalist conception of logic
    Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 28 (1): 3-35. 1987.
  •  37
    California semantics meets the great fact
    Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 27 (3): 430-455. 1986.
  •  29
    Descartes's Dualism (review)
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 37 (4): 678-680. 1999.
    In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Descartes’s Dualism by Marleen RozemondSteven J. WagnerMarleen Rozemond. Descartes’s Dualism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. Pp. xx + 279. Cloth, $24.00.Rozemond gives particular attention to questions of mind-body distinctness vs. union and to the status of sensory ideas. Her historical emphasis, backed by impressive scholarship, is Descartes’s relation to the late scholastics. Rozemond is clear, alert to det…Read more
  •  28
    Descartes on the Power of "Ideas"
    History of Philosophy Quarterly 13 (3). 1996.
    This paper spells out the implications, for Descartes's theory of ideas, of my earlier paper, "Descartes's Wax: Discovering the Nature of Mind." I show that my reading of the wax investigation provides a number of clarifications of Descartes's Meditation III discussion of ideas. My reading of Meditation III provides a ground, internal to the Meditations for Descartes's claims about objective reality, the causal laws, material falsity and the idea of God. I show that Descartes's claims and conclu…Read more
  •  25
    The Seas of Language (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 48 (4): 892-894. 1995.
    Three issues have preoccupied Dummett: a distinction between realism and antirealism; the idea of a theory of meaning for a language L; and the nature of analytic philosophy. All three appear here, but in different measures. While Dummett's conception of philosophy plays a large role, it receives little discussion, and his remarks on related questions about thought and language are a nadir of the book. The treatment of realism, which includes Dummett's noted distinction between reductionism and …Read more
  •  14
    Descartes' Meditations is one of the most thoroughly analyzed of all philosophical texts. Nevertheless, central issues in Descartes' thought remain unresolved, particularly the problem of the Cartesian Circle. Most attempts to deal with that problem have weakened the force of Descartes' own doubts or weakened the goals he was seeking. In this book, Stephen I. Wagner gives Descartes' doubts their strongest force and shows how he overcomes those doubts, establishing with metaphysical certainty the…Read more
  •  13
    Review of Husain Sarkar, Descartes' Cogito: Saved From the Great Shipwreck (review)
    Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2003 (11). 2003.
  •  11
    Naturalism: A Critical Appraisal
    with Jeffrey S. Poland and Richard Warner
    Philosophical Review 104 (3): 471. 1995.
  •  10
    Philosophical Logic
    with G. H. von Wright
    Philosophical Review 95 (3): 427. 1986.
  •  6
    Book Reviews (review)
    Philosophia Mathematica 4 (3): 270-280. 1996.
  •  4
    The liberal and the lycanthrope
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 69 (June): 165-74. 1988.
  • Relation
    In Robert Audi (ed.), The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, Cambridge University Press. pp. 788--789. 1999.
  • Book Reviews (review)
    Philosophia Mathematica 5 (2): 173-188. 1997.
  • Crispin Wright, Frege's Conception of Numbers as Objects (review)
    Philosophy in Review 6 135-137. 1986.
  • Book Reviews (review)
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 37 (4): 678. 1999.