Philosophy
Google Scholar • Phil Papers • ORCID • Research Gate
Welcome to the Philosophy section of my home site. Here you will find a list of my publications and on-line versions of as yet unpublished papers. You can also download my CV if for some reason you'd like to do that. (Note: That will not always be fully up to date.)
You may note that my name has changed. For information about how to cite my work in light of that fact, please see this page.
I have also posted various sorts of teaching materials, including syllabi for courses I've taught in the past and some handouts for those courses.
Most of my work has been in the areas of philosophy of language, logic, mathematics, and mind. My work in all of these areas has focused, much of the time, on the prospects for Fregean treatments of various subjects: Thus, my paper "The Sense of Communication", published by Mind in 1995, was concerned to defend a broadly Fregean account of the meanings of proper names; and my work in the philosophy of mathematics focuses on the possibilities and prospects of a Fregean account of the epistemology and ontology of arithmetic. This work has, of necessity, required me to do a fair bit of historical exploration of Frege's texts.
Many of my papers on Frege's philosophy of logic and mathematics have now been published together as Frege's Theorem, and much of my work on Frege's Basic Laws of Arithmetic has been brought together as a book-length study, Reading Frege's Grundgesetze, both of which were published by Oxford University Press.
More recently, I have been working on a range of issues concerning gender and sexuality. Concerning the former, most philosophical work on gender, especially the more recent work, has been focused on gender categories: what we might think of as the 'objective' aspect of gender. I am more interested in its 'subjective' aspect, that is, the experience of oneself as a gendered person. I take it that this is what people usually have in mind when they speak of 'gender identity', but it is not easy to get a solid grip on what that really means. That's a sure sign there is philosophical work to be done.
Concerning sexuality, I am working toward a book on pornography. I want to offer an account of what it 'problematic' about a lot of 'mainstream' pornography (sexist, racist, etc) without lumping all pornography together, as too many philosophical (and other sorts of writers) do. I have a special interest here in the transformative potential of queer and feminist pornography.
I am Associate Editor for Philosophy of Logic and Philosophy of Mathematics for Thought, am a member of the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Philosophical Logic, Philosophers' Imprint, and Philosophia Mathematica, and of the Advisory Board of the Journal for the History of Analytic Philosophy. I also sit on the panel of Ask Philosophers.
I am honored to have been photographed by Steven Pyke for his book Philosophers. A photograph is here. I did an interview at the Northern Institute of Philosophy for their Philosophers on Film series. I was also interviewed by Richard Marshall for 3A.M. magazine.
On a slightly different note, there are a handful of simple programs on this site that make my philosophical life easier.
I have an Erdös number of five: Me → George Boolos → Hilary Putnam → Marian Boykan Pour-El → Ian Richards → Paul Erdös.
