Philosophy

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 Here you will find a list of my publications and on-line versions of as yet unpublished papers. 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. There are also some comments on the Philosophical Gourmet Report and an essay I wrote some years ago on how to choose a graduate program.

My interests lie primarily in the areas of philosophy of language, logic, and mathematics, and these are the areas in which I teach most of my courses. My work in all of these areas focuses, 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 has focused, so far, 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, and the results of that work have been published in a series of papers on Frege's Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, two of which appear in William Demopoulos's nice collection Frege's Philosophy of Mathematics, published by Harvard University Press. References to the others can be found in the list of publications.

I am a member of the board of editors of Philosophers' Imprint, and I sit on the panel of Ask Philosophers. I am also the developer and maintainer of PhOnline, a searchable database of online papers in philosophy.

You can also find me here.

On a slightly different note, there are a handful of simple programs on this site that make my philosophical life easier.