89 thinkers, books, and ideas connected to this field.
British philosopher who brought logical empiricism to English audiences in Language, Truth and Logic and developed emotivism — moral statements express emotions rather than stating facts.
American philosopher who has worked on the history of analytic philosophy and the philosophy of language.
American philosopher who has developed easy ontology — a deflationary approach to metaphysics according to which existence questions can often be answered 'easily' by appeal to linguistic and conceptual facts.
The dominant tradition in British and American academic philosophy since the early 20th century, characterized by rigorous argumentation, formal logic, conceptual analysis, and engagement with science and language.
Athenian philosopher, student of Socrates, generally regarded as the founder or forerunner of Cynicism, who argued for virtue as the sole good and radical self-sufficiency.
Noam Chomsky's major theoretical work establishing the standard theory of transformational-generative grammar, distinguishing competence from performance and deep from surface structure.
Indian philosopher and grammarian who developed the philosophy of language as metaphysics — language (sabdabrahman) is the ultimate reality — and the sphota doctrine: the sentence as an indivisible unit of meaning.
The epistemic view that the truth conditions of knowledge attributions (S knows that p) vary with the context of the attributor — what counts as knowing varies depending on the stakes and purposes of the person making the attribution.
American philosopher at University of Texas who has worked on logic, deontic logic, and conditional norms, and is known for widely used logic textbooks.
American linguist who lived among the Pirahã people of the Amazon for decades and argued that Pirahã language lacks recursion — challenging Chomsky's universal grammar hypothesis.
American philosopher who has worked on pragmatism, philosophy of language, and American analytic philosophy.
Australian philosopher best known for formulating the hard problem of consciousness and developing two-dimensional semantics as a tool in philosophy of mind.
American philosopher who developed the formal semantics of indexicals and demonstratives, distinguishing character from content.
American philosopher who defended modal realism — the view that possible worlds are concrete, spatiotemporally isolated universes — and made foundational contributions to semantics, mind, and metaphysics.
American philosopher who has defended conventionalism about modal necessity — necessary truths are necessary because of linguistic convention, not mind-independent modal facts.
British philosopher who developed the sortal theory of identity and persistence — objects persist as the same only relative to a sortal concept — and has argued for a cognitivist view of ethics.
Jacques Derrida's practice of reading philosophical and literary texts to expose the hierarchical binary oppositions they depend on and the internal contradictions that undermine their claims to stable meaning.
David Kaplan's foundational essay developing the formal logic of indexicals and demonstratives, distinguishing character from content.
American philosopher working on mental content, concepts, and the philosophy of language.
American philosopher who has worked on the semantics of proper names and essential properties.
American philosopher who developed anomalous monism — mental events are physical but mental descriptions are irreducible — truth-conditional semantics based on Tarski, and the principle of charity in interpretation.
American philosopher who collaborated with Jerry Fodor on critiques of meaning holism and with Donald Davidson on semantic theory.
Australian analytic philosopher who devised the knowledge argument against physicalism and co-developed conceptual analysis as a philosophical method.
German philosopher who has worked on formal logic, philosophy of language, and the foundations of ethics, contributing to German analytic philosophy.
American philosopher who worked on Davidsonian action theory and interpretation.
Frank Jackson's defense of conceptual analysis as the method linking ordinary discourse to serious metaphysics, arguing that philosophy must pass through conceptual claims before reaching ontological ones.
British philosopher who, before dying at 34, produced one of the most important works in the philosophy of language and mind — The Varieties of Reference — developing a neo-Fregean account of singular thought.
British philosopher who has written on aesthetics and the philosophy of art, including a study of Croce's aesthetic theory.
A placeholder person used in philosophical thought experiments concerning 2D semantics alongside Anand.
American philosopher who has defended the evidential authority of intuitions — intuitions are genuine evidence about the a priori — and developed a systematic account of mental properties as sui generis.
British philosopher who demolished the Cartesian ghost in the machine — mind-body dualism — by showing it rests on a category mistake, and introduced the distinction between knowing-how and knowing-that.
German mathematician and philosopher who invented modern predicate logic and introduced the sense/reference distinction, founding analytic philosophy of language.
German-British philosopher who has written on Wittgenstein and contributed to the historiography of analytic philosophy.
Guatemalan-American philosopher who contributed to the theory of indexicals (quasi-indexicals) and developed guise theory — a comprehensive ontology of propositional attitudes.
American philosopher who transformed philosophy of language with semantic externalism and the twin earth thought experiment, and later evolved from scientific realism to pragmatism.
Australian philosopher who has made extensive contributions to the philosophy of language and modal logic, particularly concerning the analysis of connectives and the logic of indexicals.
Canadian philosopher who has contributed to scientific realism, the philosophy of probability, the analysis of social construction, and the philosophy of mathematics.
Algerian-French philosopher who developed deconstruction — a practice of reading that exposes the internal tensions and hierarchical oppositions structuring philosophical and literary texts.
American philosopher who worked on agent-relative obligations in deontic logic, the metaphysics of action, and edited the Philosophical Perspectives series.
French philosopher who defined postmodernism as incredulity toward grand narratives of legitimation, developed the notion of the differend, and analyzed the sublime as the postmodern aesthetic.
American philosopher who defended the language of thought hypothesis — thought occurs in an innate mentalese — and the modularity thesis, arguing that the mind is organized into informationally encapsulated domain-specific modules.
German philosopher who developed the idea that each culture and historical period has its own intrinsic value and should be understood on its own terms — the root of historicism and cultural pluralism — against the Enlightenment's universalism.
British-American philosopher who has contributed to epistemology (the lottery paradox, knowledge-how), metaphysics (four-dimensionalism, material objects), and philosophy of language.
American philosopher who developed speech act theory, the Chinese Room argument against strong AI, and biological naturalism — the view that consciousness is a causally emergent property of brain processes.
British philosopher who has written the definitive study of John Stuart Mill and developed a neo-Millian account of normative reasons.
German philosopher and the leading figure of second-generation Frankfurt School critical theory, who developed the theory of communicative action — rationality is embedded in the pragmatics of communicative practice — and discourse ethics.
Swedish philosopher who has worked on the normativity of meaning, perception, and the relationship between content and rationality.
American philosopher who revived the notion of essence as real definition — distinct from modal necessity — developed the theory of grounding, and contributed to neo-logicism.
A. J. Ayer's influential introduction to logical empiricism arguing for the verificationist criterion of meaning and emotivism about ethics.
Nelson Goodman's application of symbol theory to the arts, analyzing representation, expression, and exemplification as modes of reference and distinguishing allographic from autographic arts.
American philosopher who has worked on the logic of indexical expressions and theories of reference.
Edmund Husserl's two-volume foundational work critiquing psychologism in logic and developing the method of intentional analysis — the founding text of phenomenology.
American philosopher who has worked on inferentialism, normative pragmatics, and the relationship between language and ethics.
British philosopher who has worked on the nature of mental content, the semantics of natural language, and epistemic warrant — developing accounts of how content is individuated and how a priori knowledge is possible.
British-American analytic philosopher who contributed to the philosophy of language, logic, and metaphysics — famous for the thought experiment against Leibniz's principle of the identity of indiscernibles.
British philosopher who developed anti-realism — the meaning of a statement is given by its assertibility conditions, not its truth conditions — and produced the authoritative scholarly interpretation of Frege.
Saul Kripke's landmark work — originally a set of lectures — demolishing descriptivist theories of names and establishing the causal theory of reference and the necessity of identity.
American philosopher who developed a constructivist worldmaking view — there is no mind-independent world, only versions of it — and a symbol-theoretic account of art in Languages of Art.
American linguist and political philosopher who revolutionized linguistics by arguing that language is an innate faculty (universal grammar), developed transformational-generative grammar, and has been a sustained critic of US foreign policy.
Aristotle's treatise on propositions, truth, and falsity — including the famous sea battle argument about future contingents.
American philosopher who has contributed to the analysis of mental content, self-knowledge, and has written a widely-read critique of epistemic relativism.
British philosopher who developed minimalism about truth — the meaning of 'true' is exhausted by the Equivalence Schema — and has written on Wittgenstein, probability, and the nature of meaning.
Canadian philosopher who has worked on the relationship between language and pictures in representational art.
British analytic philosopher who made foundational contributions to the logic of predicates and ethical theory, including the Geach-Frege point about the embedding of moral terms in unasserted contexts.
Swedish philosopher who has worked on compositionality of meaning, the nature of assertion, and communicative content.
Ludwig Wittgenstein's posthumously published masterwork dissolving traditional philosophical problems by attending to the actual use of language in forms of life.
Hilary Putnam's work arguing against metaphysical realism and for internal realism, containing the famous brain-in-a-vat self-refutation argument.
American philosopher who has made major contributions to neo-logicism (proving and analyzing Frege's Theorem) and to the philosophy of language.
Richard Rorty was an American neopragmatist philosopher who rejected representationalist epistemology and argued that liberal solidarity is built through narrative and sympathy rather than foundational philosophy.
American logician who contributed to formal pragmatics, worked with Richard Montague on intensional logic, and has worked on logics of belief.
American philosopher who has worked on visual perception and the philosophy of pictures and depiction.
American philosopher who developed a possible worlds semantics for conditionals and a pragmatic theory of assertion based on common ground.
German-American philosopher and central figure of the Vienna Circle who developed logical empiricism, the linguistic framework theory of metaphysics, and intensional semantics.
American philosopher and logician who revolutionized philosophy of language through modal logic semantics, the causal theory of names, and the distinction between necessity and apriority.
The traditional philosophical theory of concepts holding that every concept can be analyzed into necessary and sufficient conditions — features that all and only instances of the concept possess.
Essay by David Chalmers distinguishing epistemic and subjective components of mental content using two-dimensional framework.
Essay by Chalmers arguing that narrow content — content shared by duplicates — can be defined as the primary intension in two-dimensional semantics.
Jürgen Habermas's two-volume systematic work developing the theory of communicative action as the foundation for critical theory and social rationality.
British philosopher who developed the knowledge-first epistemology — knowledge is the most fundamental epistemic state, not analyzable into justified true belief — and has contributed to the logic of vagueness and modal epistemology.
Ludwig Wittgenstein's early systematic work arguing that language pictures the logical structure of facts, and that what cannot be said — ethics, aesthetics, the mystical — must be passed over in silence.
W. V. O. Quine's influential essay arguing that the two dogmas of logical empiricism — the analytic-synthetic distinction and reductionism — are both untenable, holism follows.
Noam Chomsky's hypothesis that humans possess an innate, species-specific faculty for language — a universal grammar — that constrains the possible form of human languages and enables rapid first-language acquisition.
B. F. Skinner's attempt to explain all aspects of language — from word learning to poetry — as operant behavior shaped by environmental reinforcement.
Viennese philosophical discussion group (1924-1936) led by Moritz Schlick that developed logical empiricism — the application of mathematical logic to scientific philosophy and the verificationist criterion of meaning.
American philosopher who dismantled the analytic-synthetic distinction and meaning-theoretic foundationalism in Two Dogmas of Empiricism, developed naturalistic epistemology, and argued for an inscrutability of reference.
American philosopher who made seminal contributions to the critique of the given, the nature of semantic concepts, and the relationship between the scientific and manifest images of the world — widely regarded as one of the most important American philosophers of the 20th century.
Confucian philosopher who opposed Mencius's optimism, arguing that human nature is originally bad — desires tend toward excess — and that ritual and education impose order on natural tendencies.
Frege's 1892 essay introducing the distinction between Sinn (sense/mode of presentation) and Bedeutung (reference/denotation), resolving the puzzle of informative identity statements.