Stephen Schiffer

Last updated
Stephen Schiffer
Born1940
Era Contemporary philosophy
Region Western philosophy
School Analytic
Main interests
Philosophy of language

Stephen Schiffer (born 1940) is an American philosopher and currently Silver Professor of Philosophy at New York University. He is a specialist in the philosophy of language.

Contents

Education and career

Schiffer was awarded a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania in 1962 and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Oxford University in 1970. He taught at the University of California, Berkeley, University of Arizona, and Graduate Center of the City University of New York before moving to New York University Department of Philosophy. He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007. [1]

Philosophical work

He has specialized in the philosophy of language, and is the author of three significant works concerning semantic meaning: Meaning (OUP, 1972), Remnants of Meaning (MIT Press, 1987), and The Things We Mean (OUP, 2003).

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William Alston</span> American philosopher (1921–2009)

William Payne Alston was an American philosopher. He is widely considered to be one of the most important epistemologists and philosophers of religion of the twentieth century, and is also known for his work in metaphysics and the philosophy of language. His views on foundationalism, internalism and externalism, speech acts, and the epistemic value of mystical experience, among many other topics, have been very influential. He earned his PhD from the University of Chicago and taught at the University of Michigan, Rutgers University, University of Illinois, and Syracuse University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Humanities</span> Academic disciplines that study society and culture

Humanities are academic disciplines that study aspects of human society and culture, including certain fundamental questions asked by humans. During the Renaissance, the term 'humanities' referred to the study of classical literature and language, as opposed to the study of religion or 'divinity.' The study of the humanities was a key part of the secular curriculum in universities at the time. Today, the humanities are more frequently defined as any fields of study outside of natural sciences, social sciences, formal sciences, and applied sciences. They use methods that are primarily critical, speculative, or interpretative and have a significant historical element—as distinguished from the mainly empirical approaches of science.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paul Grice</span> British philosopher of language (1913–1988)

Herbert Paul Grice, usually publishing under the name H. P. Grice, H. Paul Grice, or Paul Grice, was a British philosopher of language who created the theory of implicature and the cooperative principle, which became foundational concepts in the linguistic field of pragmatics. His work on meaning has also influenced the philosophical study of semantics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paul Ricœur</span> French philosopher (1913–2005)

Jean Paul Gustave Ricœur was a French philosopher best known for combining phenomenological description with hermeneutics. As such, his thought is within the same tradition as other major hermeneutic phenomenologists, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Gabriel Marcel. In 2000, he was awarded the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy for having "revolutionized the methods of hermeneutic phenomenology, expanding the study of textual interpretation to include the broad yet concrete domains of mythology, biblical exegesis, psychoanalysis, theory of metaphor, and narrative theory."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nicholas Rescher</span> American philosopher (1928–2024)

Nicholas Rescher was a German-born American philosopher, polymath, and author, who was a professor of philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh from 1961. He was chairman of the Center for Philosophy of Science and chairman of the philosophy department.

Jonathan Culler is an American literary critic. He was Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. His published works are in the fields of structuralism, literary theory and literary criticism.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carl Gustav Hempel</span> German writer and philosopher (1905–1997)

Carl Gustav "Peter" Hempel was a German writer, philosopher, logician, and epistemologist. He was a major figure in logical empiricism, a 20th-century movement in the philosophy of science. Hempel articulated the deductive-nomological model of scientific explanation, which was considered the "standard model" of scientific explanation during the 1950s and 1960s. He is also known for the raven paradox.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gregory Currie</span>

Gregory Paul Currie FAHA is a British philosopher and academic, known for his work on philosophical aesthetics and the philosophy of mind. Currie is Professor of Philosophy at the University of York and Executive Editor of Mind & Language.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Barbara H. Partee</span> American linguist

Barbara Hall Partee is a Distinguished University Professor Emerita of Linguistics and Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass). She is known as a pioneer in the field of formal semantics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stephen Neale</span> British philosopher

Stephen Roy Albert Neale is a British philosopher and specialist in the philosophy of language who has written extensively about meaning, information, interpretation, and communication, and more generally about issues at the intersection of philosophy and linguistics. Neale is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Linguistics and holder of the John H. Kornblith Family Chair in the Philosophy of Science and Values at the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY).

Tyler Burge is an American philosopher who is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at UCLA. Burge has made contributions to many areas of philosophy, including the philosophy of mind, philosophy of logic, epistemology, philosophy of language, and the history of philosophy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Philip Pettit</span> Irish philosopher and political theorist

Philip Noel Pettit is an Irish philosopher and political theorist. He is the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Politics and Human Values at Princeton University and also Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University.

Gordon Park Baker was an American-English philosopher. His topics of interest included Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gottlob Frege, Friedrich Waismann, Bertrand Russell, the Vienna Circle, and René Descartes. He was noted for his collaboration with Peter Hacker and his disagreements with Michael Dummett.

Terence Dwight Parsons (1939–2022) was an American philosopher, specializing in philosophy of language and metaphysics. He was emeritus professor of philosophy at UCLA.

Jefferson Allen McMahan is an American moral philosopher. He has been Sekyra and White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford since 2014.

Stephen Mulhall is a British philosopher and Fellow of New College, Oxford. His main research areas are Ludwig Wittgenstein and post-Kantian philosophy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Miranda Fricker</span> English feminist philosopher

Miranda Fricker, FBA FAAS is a British philosopher who is Professor of Philosophy at New York University, Co-Director of the New York Institute of Philosophy, and Honorary Professor at the University of Sheffield. Fricker coined the term epistemic injustice, the concept of an injustice done against someone "specifically in their capacity as a knower", and explored the concept in her 2007 book Epistemic Injustice.

Paul Crowther is a British philosopher. He is a professor of philosophy and author specialising in the fields of aesthetics, metaphysics, and visual culture. He has written nine books in the field of History of Art and Philosophy. He was born in Leeds, West Riding of Yorkshire, England, and he was raised in the Belle Isle estate, Hunslet, and Middleton areas of south Leeds. He began taking an interest in art and philosophy at the age of 16. He is a proponent of an approach to aesthetics he dubbed "post-analytic phenomenology".

James Higginbotham FBA was a distinguished professor of Linguistics and Philosophy at the University of Southern California. He taught previously at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Columbia University, and at the University of Oxford as a Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford.

Mutual knowledge is a fundamental concept about information in game theory, (epistemic) logic, and epistemology. An event is mutual knowledge if all agents know that the event occurred. However, mutual knowledge by itself implies nothing about what agents know about other agents' knowledge: i.e. it is possible that an event is mutual knowledge but that each agent is unaware that the other agents know it has occurred. Common knowledge is a related but stronger notion; any event that is common knowledge is also mutual knowledge.

References