David H. Sanford (born 1937) is a professor of philosophy at Duke University. He specializes in perception and metaphysics.
Duke University is a private research university in Durham, North Carolina. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day town of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco and electric power industrialist James Buchanan Duke established The Duke Endowment and the institution changed its name to honor his deceased father, Washington Duke.
Perception is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information, or the environment.
Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that examines the fundamental nature of reality, including the relationship between mind and matter, between substance and attribute, and between possibility and actuality. The word "metaphysics" comes from two Greek words that, together, literally mean "after or behind or among the [study of] the natural". It has been suggested that the term might have been coined by a first century CE editor who assembled various small selections of Aristotle’s works into the treatise we now know by the name Metaphysics.
Sanford studied at Cass Technical High School, Oberlin College and at Wayne State University. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1966, taught at Dartmouth College from 1963 to 1970, and joined the Duke Faculty in 1970. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Michigan and the University of Oregon.
Cass Technical High School, commonly referred to as Cass Tech, is a four-year university preparatory high school in Midtown Detroit, United States. The school is named in honor of Lewis Cass, an American military officer and politician who served as governor of the Michigan Territory from 1813 until 1831. The school is a part of Detroit Public Schools.
Oberlin College is a private liberal arts college in Oberlin, Ohio. Founded as the Oberlin Collegiate Institute in 1833 by John Jay Shipherd and Philo Stewart, it is the oldest coeducational liberal arts college in the United States and the second oldest continuously operating coeducational institute of higher learning in the world. The Oberlin Conservatory of Music is the oldest continuously operating conservatory in the United States. In 1835 Oberlin became one of the first colleges in the United States to admit African Americans, and in 1837 the first to admit women.
Wayne State University (WSU) is an American public research university located in Detroit, Michigan. Founded in 1868, WSU consists of 13 schools and colleges offering nearly 350 programs to more than 27,000 graduate and undergraduate students. Wayne State University is Michigan's third-largest university.
Much of Sanford's work is about conditionals. His book If P, Then Q: Conditionals and the Foundations of Reasoning was published in 1989, second edition 2003,
Sanford's influence in analytic philosophy extends well beyond his published work in metaphysics. From 2006 to 2007, he was president of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology.
Analytic philosophy is a style of philosophy that became dominant in the Western world at the beginning of the 20th century. The term can refer to one of several things:
David Kellogg Lewis was an American philosopher. Lewis taught briefly at UCLA and then at Princeton from 1970 until his death. He is also closely associated with Australia, whose philosophical community he visited almost annually for more than thirty years. He made contributions in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, philosophy of probability, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophical logic, and aesthetics. He is probably best known for his controversial modal realist stance: that (i) possible worlds exist, (ii) every possible world is a concrete entity, (iii) any possible world is causally and spatiotemporally isolated from any other possible world, and (iv) our world is among the possible worlds.
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