Books Published and Forthcoming

I: The Meaning of the First Person Term
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006)

I is the most widely misunderstood of our essential everyday expressions. The book aims to offer a philosophical remedy for the resulting confusion by explaining what I means—the logical character of the term, its inferential role, referential function, expressive use and communicative role. On the way, the book dissolves various false doctrines supporting the standard view that I is a pure indexical. The central claims are that I is a deictic term, like the other singular personal pronouns (You and He/ She), and that the key to understanding such terms lies in appreciating the ways their reference depends on making an individual salient.  View First Chapter

Hilary Putnam
(McGill-Queens University Press / Acumen, 2006)

Hilary Putnam has had a dramatic influence on theories of meaning, semantic content, the nature of mental phenomena, on interpretations of quantum mechanics, theory-change, logic, mathematics, and on what shape we should desire for future philosophy. The diversity of his writings and his frequent spells of radical rethinking pose a considerable challenge to readers. This book aims to overcome these difficulties by offering a critical evaluation of the whole of Putnam’s career and setting it in the historical context of the development of analytic philosophy post-1945. It reveals a basic unity in Putnam’s work, achieved through repeated engagements with a small set of hard problems, all of which stem from the need to account for the intentionality of thought and language.