John Perry (philosopher)

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John R. Perry (b. 1943) is Henry Waldgrave Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University. He has made significant contributions to areas of philosophy, including logic, philosophy of language, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind. He is known primarily for his work on situation semantics (together with Jon Barwise), reflexivity, indexicality, and self-knowledge.

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[edit] Biography

John Perry was born in Lincoln, Nebraska on the 16th of January, 1943. He received his B.A. in philosophy from Doane College in 1964 and his Ph.D. in philosophy from Cornell University in 1968. He was awarded the Jean Nicod Prize in 1999.[1]

Perry is currently Henry Waldgrave Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University. In 2004, he became co-host, with Kenneth Taylor, of Philosophy Talk, the radio program that "questions everything... except your intelligence". He is also part of the Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI)—an independent research center founded in 1983.[2]

[edit] Work

Perry has made contributions to many areas of philosophy, including logic, philosophy of language, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind. However, Perry also produces non-technical work that reaches a wider audience, such as his humorous 1995 online essay "Structured Procrastination".[3]

Perry's 1978 book A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality, deals with standard problems in the theory of personal identity in the form of a dialogue between a terminally ill university professor, Gretchen Weirob, and her two friends, Sam Miller and Dave Cohen. The views represented include those of Bernard Williams, John Locke, and Derek Parfit. The format of associating different philosophical positions with different characters in a dialogue recalls David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.

In logic, Perry and Jon Barwise are known for discussion of the slingshot argument, especially in their 1981 article "Semantic Innocence and Uncompromising Situations".

In his 2001 book Knowledge, Possibility and Consciousness, Perry argues for what he calls "antecedent physicalism", according to which physicalism is antecedently taken to be a plausible and reasonable position, provided that there are no better rival theories. Thus, Perry defends a version of type physicalism against three major philosophical arguments for dualism: the zombie argument, the knowledge argument, and the modal argument.

[edit] Partial bibliography

[edit] Books

  • (1978) A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company.
  • (1983) Situations and Attitudes (with Jon Barwise). Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press. (Reprinted with a new introduction by CSLI Publications, 1999.)
  • (1993) The Problem of the Essential Indexical and Other Essays. New York: Oxford University Press. (Enlarged edition, Stanford: CSLI Publications, 2000.)
  • (1999) Dialogue on Good, Evil and the Existence of God. Cambridge/Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company.
  • (2001) Knowledge, Possibility and Consciousness. Cambridge, MA.: Bradford-MIT.
  • (2001) Reference and Reflexivity. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
  • (2002) Identity, Personal Identity and the Self, Selected Essays. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing.

[edit] Articles

  • (1972) "Can The Self Divide?". Journal of Philosophy, LXIX, no. 16, pp. 463 – 88.
  • (1977) "Frege on Demonstratives". The Philosophical Review, Vol. 86, No. 4., pp. 474-497.
  • (1979) "The Problem of the Essential Indexical". Noûs 13, no. 1: 3 – 21.
  • (1980) "A Problem about Continued Belief". Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 61, no. 4, pp. 317 – 22.
  • (1980) "Belief and Acceptance". Midwest Studies in Philosophy V, pp. 533 – 42.
  • (1981) "Semantic Innocence and Uncompromising Situations" (with Jon Barwise). Midwest Studies in Philosophy VI, pp. 387 – 403.
  • (1981) "Situations and Attitudes" (with Jon Barwise). Journal of Philosophy LXXVII, no. 1, pp. 668 – 91.
  • (1986) "From Worlds to Situations". Journal of Philosophical Logic 15, pp. 83 – 107.
  • (1986) "Thought Without Representation". Supplementary Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol. 60, pp. 263 – 83.
  • (1988) "Cognitive Significance and New Theories of Reference". Noûs 2, no. 2, pp. 1 – 18.
  • (1989) "The Prince and the Phonebooth: Reporting Puzzling Beliefs" (with Mark Crimmins). Journal of Philosophy, pp. 685 – 711.
  • (1993) "Executions, Motivations and Accomplishments" (with David Israel and Syun Tutiya). The Philosophical Review, pp. 515 – 40.
  • (1994) "Fodor and Lepore on Holism". Philosophical Studies, 73, pp. 123-138.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Biographical details from John Perry's curriculum vitae, http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~john/vita/vita.html.
  2. ^ CSLI Center for the Study of Language and Information - Stanford University
  3. ^ Structured Procrastination

[edit] See also

[edit] External links