Theodore Sider

Last updated
Ted Sider
Alma mater University of Massachusetts Amherst
Era Contemporary philosophy
Region Western philosophy
School Analytic
Main interests
Metaphysics, philosophy of language
Notable ideas
Four-dimensionalism
Influences

Theodore "Ted" Sider is an American philosopher specializing in metaphysics and philosophy of language. He is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University.

Contents

Family

Sider is the son of theologian Ronald Sider. He is the partner of Jill North, who is also hired by Rutgers' philosophy faculty.

Education and career

Since earning his Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1993, Sider has taught at the University of Rochester, Syracuse University, New York University, Cornell University, and Rutgers University from 2002 to 2007 and, again, since 2015. Sider has published three books and some four dozen papers. [1] He has also edited a textbook in metaphysics with John Hawthorne and Dean Zimmerman. [2]

Sider was the recipient of the 2003 APA Book Prize for his book, Four-Dimensionalism: An Ontology of Persistence and Time. [3] He gave the John Locke Lectures at Oxford University in 2016. [4]

Books

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Metaphysics</span> Branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of reality

Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that studies the fundamental nature of reality, the first principles of being, identity and change, space and time, causality, necessity, and possibility. It includes questions about the nature of consciousness and the relationship between mind and matter, between substance and attribute, and between potentiality 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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ontology</span> Branch of philosophy that studies concepts such as existence, being, becoming, and reality

In metaphysics, ontology is the philosophical study of being, as well as related concepts such as existence, becoming, and reality.

Edward Jonathan Lowe, usually cited as E. J. Lowe but known personally as Jonathan Lowe, was a British philosopher and academic. He was Professor of Philosophy at Durham University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wilfrid Sellars</span> American philosopher

Wilfrid Stalker Sellars was an American philosopher and prominent developer of critical realism, who "revolutionized both the content and the method of philosophy in the United States".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nicholas Wolterstorff</span> American philosopher

Nicholas Paul Wolterstorff is an American philosopher and theologian. He is currently Noah Porter Professor Emeritus Philosophical Theology at Yale University. A prolific writer with wide-ranging philosophical and theological interests, he has written books on aesthetics, epistemology, political philosophy, philosophy of religion, metaphysics, and philosophy of education. In Faith and Rationality, Wolterstorff, Alvin Plantinga, and William Alston developed and expanded upon a view of religious epistemology that has come to be known as Reformed epistemology. He also helped to establish the journal Faith and Philosophy and the Society of Christian Philosophers.

Hartry H. Field is an American philosopher. He is Silver Professor of Philosophy at New York University; he is a notable contributor to philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, epistemology, and philosophy of mind.

Modal realism is the view propounded by David Kellogg Lewis that all possible worlds are real in the same way as is the actual world: they are "of a kind with this world of ours." It is based on the following tenets: possible worlds exist; possible worlds are not different in kind from the actual world; possible worlds are irreducible entities; the term actual in actual world is indexical, i.e. any subject can declare their world to be the actual one, much as they label the place they are "here" and the time they are "now".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Merrihew Adams</span> American philosopher

Robert Merrihew Adams is an American analytic philosopher, specializing in metaphysics, philosophy of religion, ethics, and the history of early modern philosophy.

Jonathan Francis Bennett is a philosopher of language and metaphysics, specialist of Kant's philosophy and a historian of early modern philosophy. He has New Zealand citizenship by birth and has since acquired UK and Canadian citizenship.

Philosophical presentism is the view that only present entities exist. According to presentism, then, there are no wholly past or merely future entities whatsoever. In a sense, the past and the future do not exist for presentists—past events have happened and future events will happen, but neither exist at all since they do not exist now. Presentism is a view about temporal ontology that contrasts with eternalism—the view that past, present, and future entities exist —and with no-futurism—the view that only past and present entities exist.

Robert Culp Stalnaker is an American philosopher who is Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.

Ernest Sosa is an American philosopher primarily interested in epistemology. Since 2007 he has been Board of Governors Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University, but he spent most of his career at Brown University.

In philosophy, four-dimensionalism is the ontological position that an object's persistence through time is like its extension through space. Thus, an object that exists in time has temporal parts in the various subregions of the total region of time it occupies, just like an object that exists in a region of space has at least one part in every subregion of that space.

John Patrick Hawthorne is an English philosopher, currently serving as Professor of Philosophy at the Australian Catholic University in Melbourne, and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California. He is recognized as a leading contemporary contributor to metaphysics and epistemology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Barry Stroud</span> Canadian philosopher (1935–2019)

Barry Stroud was a Canadian philosopher and professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Known especially for his work on philosophical skepticism, he wrote about David Hume, Ludwig Wittgenstein, the metaphysics of color, and many other topics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dean Zimmerman (philosopher)</span> American philosopher

Dean W. Zimmerman is an American professor of philosophy at Rutgers University specializing in metaphysics and philosophy of religion.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lawrence Sklar</span> American philosopher (born 1938)

Lawrence Sklar is an American philosopher. He is the Carl G. Hempel and William K. Frankena Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan.

Personal identity is the unique numerical identity of a person over time. Discussions regarding personal identity typically aim to determine the necessary and sufficient conditions under which a person at one time and a person at another time can be said to be the same person, persisting through time.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Donald Cary Williams</span> American philosopher

Donald Cary Williams, usually cited as D. C. Williams, was an American philosopher and a professor at both the University of California Los Angeles and at Harvard University.

Extended modal realism is a metaphysical theory developed by Takashi Yagisawa. It concerns the question of what it means that something is possible or necessary. Modal realism is the view that besides the actual world, there are many possible worlds. They exist as alternate versions of the actual world we live in. It contrasts with actualism, which holds that there is only one world: the actual world. Extended modal realism is a special form of modal realism. It includes the controversial thesis that there are not just possible worlds but also impossible worlds. An impossible world is a world that contains a contradiction. Extended modal realism understands modality as a dimension similar to space and time. In this sense, a regular object, like a tree or a car, is not just extended in space and time but also across possible and impossible worlds: some parts of it exist in the actual world and other parts exist in non-actual worlds. There is only one universe encompassing everything that is real in the widest sense: the actual, the possible, and the impossible.

References

  1. Sider's CV
  2. Contemporary Debates in Metaphysics, Oxford: Blackwell, 2007.
  3. Waters, Anne; Kim, David H.; Garcia, J. L. A.; May, Larry; Fisher, Saul; Cavalier, Robert; Nails, Debra; Nuccetelli, Susana; Outlaw, Lucius; Olson, Alan M.; Chekola, Mark; McCarthy, Thomas; Kipnis, Kenneth; Weinstein, Mark; French, Peter; McKenna, Erin; Granitto, James V.; Tuana, Nancy (2004). "Reports of APA Committees". Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association. 77 (5): 69–109. JSTOR   3219762.
  4. "John Locke Lectures - Faculty of Philosophy". Archived from the original on 2008-10-21. Retrieved 2008-10-21.