Arthur Schipper
AOS: Logic & Metaphysics; Methodology of Metaphysics; (esp. Metaphysics of Mind & Language, Intentionality/Aboutness, Truthmaker Theory, Action); the History of these subjects
AOC: Philosophy of Mind & Language; Philosophical Methodology, Epistemology
I am an Assistant Professor in Philosophy at UAEU. Before this, I was a tenure-track Assistant Professor at the Department of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Peking University; a Lecturer (5-year post) at the University of Amsterdam in the group Philosophical Tradition in Context, and a regular member of the Institute of Logic, Language, and Computation (ILLC) and the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA); University Lecturer (Universitair docent, Assistant Professor, untenured) in Theoretical Philosophy at the Institute for Philosophy, Leiden University; and tutor at University College London and Heythrop College, University of London.
My main research focus is the relation between language and reality. Specifically, I am developing a version of truthmaker theory and a theory of aboutness and intentionality which I combine to address central issues in metaphysics, metametaphysics, epistemology, philosophical logic, and the philosophies of mind, language, and action. I also have strong research interests, and have significant publications, in the history of philosophy and in practical philosophy.
I have published my work in top-tier philosophy journals and venues such as Philosophical Studies, the European Journal of Philosophy, Synthese, the Journal of the American Philosophical Association, the Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Theoria, Metaphysica, and The Philosophical Quarterly. I received my PhD from University College London, for a dissertation entitled `Truth and Reality: The Importance of Truthmaking for Philosophy' under the main supervision of Grote Professor of Mind & Logic Paul Snowdon. Professor Tim Crane was also an important influence. I also completed a Master of Philosophical Studies (MPhil Stud) at UCL with the thesis ‘States, Events, and Mental Causation’, supervised by Prof Kalderon, and with Philosophy of Mind, Logic & Metaphysics, and David Hume as my three examination topics, working with Lucy O'Brien and José Zalabardo. Before that I was at New York University, working with Professors Peter K. Unger (main mentor), Elizabeth Harman (supervisor & mentor), William Ruddick, Bertell Ollman, Thomas Nagel, Hartry Field, Kit Fine, Michael Raven, and others. I have taught (at both undergraduate and graduate levels, and on a very wide variety of courses, including everything in my AOS and AOCs) at UCL and Heythrop College, University of London, and Leiden University as Universitair docent (University lecturer - assistant professor) the University of Amsterdam, Peking University, and now UAEU as Assistant Professor, teaching metaphysics, logic, philosophy of language, epistemology, the history of philosophy, the philosophy of science and of the humanities, critical thinking, etc.
Areas with further concrete teaching experience:
History of Philosophy (especially Early Modern, Critical Theory, & Analytical Philosophy), Philosophical Logic, Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Psychology, Philosophy of Psychoanalysis, Practical (especially Bio) Ethics, Social and Political Philosophy, the Philosophy of the Humanities, the Philosophy of Art
Supervisors: Main Supervisor: Professor Paul Snowdon;, Professor Tim Crane, Professor Mark Eli Kalderon, Professor José Zalabardo, Lucy O'Brien, Elizabeth Harman, and Peter Unger
AOC: Philosophy of Mind & Language; Philosophical Methodology, Epistemology
I am an Assistant Professor in Philosophy at UAEU. Before this, I was a tenure-track Assistant Professor at the Department of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Peking University; a Lecturer (5-year post) at the University of Amsterdam in the group Philosophical Tradition in Context, and a regular member of the Institute of Logic, Language, and Computation (ILLC) and the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA); University Lecturer (Universitair docent, Assistant Professor, untenured) in Theoretical Philosophy at the Institute for Philosophy, Leiden University; and tutor at University College London and Heythrop College, University of London.
My main research focus is the relation between language and reality. Specifically, I am developing a version of truthmaker theory and a theory of aboutness and intentionality which I combine to address central issues in metaphysics, metametaphysics, epistemology, philosophical logic, and the philosophies of mind, language, and action. I also have strong research interests, and have significant publications, in the history of philosophy and in practical philosophy.
I have published my work in top-tier philosophy journals and venues such as Philosophical Studies, the European Journal of Philosophy, Synthese, the Journal of the American Philosophical Association, the Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Theoria, Metaphysica, and The Philosophical Quarterly. I received my PhD from University College London, for a dissertation entitled `Truth and Reality: The Importance of Truthmaking for Philosophy' under the main supervision of Grote Professor of Mind & Logic Paul Snowdon. Professor Tim Crane was also an important influence. I also completed a Master of Philosophical Studies (MPhil Stud) at UCL with the thesis ‘States, Events, and Mental Causation’, supervised by Prof Kalderon, and with Philosophy of Mind, Logic & Metaphysics, and David Hume as my three examination topics, working with Lucy O'Brien and José Zalabardo. Before that I was at New York University, working with Professors Peter K. Unger (main mentor), Elizabeth Harman (supervisor & mentor), William Ruddick, Bertell Ollman, Thomas Nagel, Hartry Field, Kit Fine, Michael Raven, and others. I have taught (at both undergraduate and graduate levels, and on a very wide variety of courses, including everything in my AOS and AOCs) at UCL and Heythrop College, University of London, and Leiden University as Universitair docent (University lecturer - assistant professor) the University of Amsterdam, Peking University, and now UAEU as Assistant Professor, teaching metaphysics, logic, philosophy of language, epistemology, the history of philosophy, the philosophy of science and of the humanities, critical thinking, etc.
Areas with further concrete teaching experience:
History of Philosophy (especially Early Modern, Critical Theory, & Analytical Philosophy), Philosophical Logic, Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Psychology, Philosophy of Psychoanalysis, Practical (especially Bio) Ethics, Social and Political Philosophy, the Philosophy of the Humanities, the Philosophy of Art
Supervisors: Main Supervisor: Professor Paul Snowdon;, Professor Tim Crane, Professor Mark Eli Kalderon, Professor José Zalabardo, Lucy O'Brien, Elizabeth Harman, and Peter Unger
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Original Peer-reviewed Papers by Arthur Schipper
This paper is co-authored with Ivan V. Ivanov.
Co-authored with Paul Snowdon.
Henry Habberley Price, who published as H. H. Price, was born in 1899. From 1935 to 1959 he was Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford University. Price was a major figure in his lifetime well-known especially for the “clarity and elegance of style”, which, according to Martha Kneale (1996: xix), make his works readable in spite of changing fashions in philosophy. Many people’s acquaintance nowadays with Price’s philosophical work derives from his being a target in Austin’s (1962) famous attack on the sense-datum theory. This restricted acquaintance with his output is one reason that Price has been ignored in recent philosophy.
Mainstream philosophy neglected him after the Second World War, perhaps partly because, when articulating his ideas, he mainly engaged with philosophers of the past, such as Locke and Hume. His thought was, however, valued by fellow philosophers such as Broad, Moore, Ayer, and generations of his students at Oxford, including Sellars, Armstrong, and Anscombe.
Although Price is seen mainly as a philosopher of perception, only two of his six books are about perception and he had a major influence, also publishing many articles, on a variety of topics, including some we cannot focus on here, e.g., our evidence of other minds (1938; 1930b: 195) and psychical research (1940c; 1953b; 1972; 1995; an interest he claims to share with Neo-Platonists [1968a: 447]). We can only provide a sketch of his rich contributions. After briefly sketching his life (§1), we discuss his philosophy’s general features (§2), contributions to the studies of perception (§3), properties (§5.1), recognition (§5), belief (§6), religious belief (§6.8), his revival and serious study of Hume (§4), and some remarkable anticipations (§7).
Please email me if you want a copy: schipper.philosophy@gmail.com
Abstract
This paper argues that accepting an ordinary approach to truthmakers and rejecting something I call “the metaphysical knowledge assumption” (MKA) allows us to account for inquiry in terms of truthmaking. §1 introduces inquiry and the potential place of truthmakers in inquiry. §2 presents the relevant ordinary notion of truthmakers. §3 presents and motivates MKA. This assumption, I argue (§4), makes a truthmaker-focused account of inquiry whose objects are not the fundamental nature of things impossible and thus should be rejected. The ordinary picture, which understands truthmakers not exclusively in terms of the objects of fundamental reality or of semantics (§5), but in terms of the relevant, intentional objects of inquiry, gives us an attractive, general, truthmaker-based view of inquiry.
Keywords: truthmakers; inquiry; intentionality; ontology; ordinary truthmakers
Abstract:
Linguistic ontologists and antilinguistic, ‘serious’ ontologists both accept the inference from ‘Fido is a dog’ to ‘Fido has the property of being a dog’ but disagree about its ontological consequences. In arguing that we are committed to properties on the basis of these transformations, linguistic ontologists employ a neo-Fregean meta-ontological principle, on which the function of singular terms is to refer. To reject this, serious ontologists must defend an alternative. This paper defends an alternative on which the function of singular terms is not generally to refer and on which they are generally ontologically noncommittal. This is the best way to reject linguistic, ‘easy’ arguments for the existence of properties. The account recommends neutralism about quantification (drawing on Barcan Marcus and Meinongianism), coherently bringing together two important yet uncombined meta-ontological movements. Moreover, it employs Ramseyan insights about the transformations to provide a nonreductionist, non-error-theoretic redundancy approach to explicit talk about properties.
A central tenet of truthmaker theory is that necessitation is necessary for truthmaking (NEC). This paper defends NEC in a novel, piecemeal way, namely by responding to a potential counterexample involving a changing past. If Carter won a race at t1 but is later disqualified at t2, then Carter no longer won at t1. A wholly past event seems to have changed in the future. The event makes ‘Carter won the race at t1’ (RACE) true between t1-2 but fails to make it true at t2. So, we have a potential counterexample to necessitation: a truthmaker of RACE fails in another context to make the same truthbearer RACE true. I argue that the best solution to this challenge is not that there are different truthbearers at t1-2 and t2 (the semantic response), or that race was never true because of the future disqualification or will always be true despite the future disqualification. The best solution is to accept that the past can change: past events can change based on what happens in the future (e.g., via their effects). This paper's novel defence of necessitation will illustrate the importance of utilising explicitly ontological and commonsensical tools in accounting for truth.
In this paper, I first present an overview of Asay's A Theory of Truthmaking, highlighting what I take to be some of its most attractive features, especially his re-invigoration of the ontological understanding of truthmaking and his defence of ontology-first truthmaking over explanation-first truthmaking. Then, I articulate what I take to be a puzzling potential inconsistency: (a) he appeals to considerations to do with aboutness in criticising how well ontological views account for truth while (b) ruling out aboutness from the right account of truthmaking. He argues, instead, that necessitation is both necessary and sufficient for truthmaking (§3.3). I suggest that adding aboutness to one's account in the right way is not just compatible with but important for ontology-first truthmaking. I do all this to invite Asay to clarify his position on these matters. Overall, Asay's worldview displays the fruitfulness of an ontologically serious approach to metaphysics that puts truthmaking centre-stage.
Link to the article on Synthese's Springerlink website: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-019-02266-x
Fundamental truthmakers and non-fundamental truths (Synthese, DOI: 10.1007/s11229-019-02266-x, 2021, 198:3073-3098) (Open Access) Online First 4 June 2019; 26 pages total
Download the in-print copy here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11098-018-1192-6
Truthmaker theory has been used to argue for substantial conclusions about the categorial structure of the world, in particular that states of affairs are needed to play the role of truthmakers. In this paper, I argue that closely considering the role of aboutness in truthmaking, that is considering what truthbearers are about, yields the result that there is no good truthmaker-based reason to think that truthmakers must be states of affairs understood as existing entities, whether complex or simple. First, I introduce an aboutness-based account of truthmaking as a metaphysically modest alternative to the orthodox necessitarian account of truthmaking. Second, I discuss the distinction between states and events that has been made on the basis of linguistic evidence regarding aspectual markers and nominalisation. I argue that the modest approach to truthmaking allows us to accept that there is a real distinction between states and events without requiring that the distinction is ontologically substantial. Specifically, what we are talking about with state-truthbearers really differs from what we are talking about with event-truthbearers, but this difference need not be understood as a difference in kinds of entities. Because of its overall modesty, this is a theoretically virtuous result.
A central problem for any truthmaker theory is the problem of negative truths (P- NEG). In this paper, I develop a novel, piecemeal strategy for solving this problem. The strategy puts central focus on a truth-relevant notion of aboutness within a metaphysically modest version of truthmaker theory and uses key conceptual tools gained by taking a deeper look at the best attempts to solve the problem of intentionality. I begin this task by critically discussing past proposed solutions to P- NEG in light of Russell’s debate with Demos. This reveals a central difficulty with addressing the problem, specifically that one cannot be committed to incompatibility facts in one’s account of negation and of the truth of negative truths. I then present an aboutness-based version of truthmaker theory. Utilising what I call the strict and full account of aboutness, I extract aboutness-based theories of truth and falsity. I use this machinery to present a promising new strategy for solving P- NEG which does not have the problems of alternative approaches. Finally, I present and respond to some potential objections.
Books & Theses by Arthur Schipper
Book Reviews by Arthur Schipper
https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/8124_dialectics-in-world-politics-review-by-arthur-schipper/
You can access the article by following the link above.
Papers by Arthur Schipper