Department Member, Philosophy
Lecturer
About
My principal areas of research are Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Mind and Wittgenstein. In one way or another, much of my work to date has involved investigating the place of normative considerations - concerning, for example, what a subject should, may or has reason to do - in understanding the natures of language and of the mind.
Along the way, I have worked on such topics as deflationism, externalism, fregeanism, contextualism, particularism, pragmatism, holism, inferentialism, primitivism and monism. I hope to work on these and other -isms in the future.
I've also got a long-standing interest in the films of the Coen brothers. I hope one day to get around to making a start on writing something about them (under the working-title, 'I'll show you the life of the mind!').
Some recent and forthcoming publications:
'Should I Believe the Truth?', Dialectica (forthcoming).
'Spinoza, the No Shared Attribute thesis, and the Principle of Sufficient Reason', British Journal for the History of Philosophy (forthcoming, 2011) 19.
'Leave Truth Alone: on Deflationism and Contextualism', in European Journal of Philosophy (forthcoming, 2011) 19.
'Is Meaning Fraught with Ought?', Pacific Philosophical Quarterly (forthcoming, 2009) 90.
'Particular and General: Wittgenstein, Linguistic Rules and Context', in The Later Wittgenstein on Language, ed. D. Whiting (Palgrave, forthcoming 2009).
'Between Old and New: Brandom's Analytic Pragmatism', International Journal of Philosophical Studies (2009) 17: 597-607.
'On Epistemic Conceptions of Meaning: Meaning, Use and Normativity', European Journal of Philosophy (2009) 17: 416-434.
'The Normativity of Meaning Defended', in Analysis (2007) 67: 133-140.
For more details of my publications, please see my website. Should you be at a loose end, you can dowload several of my papers. Of course, if you've any thoughts on any of the issues they discuss - or related topics - I'd be pleased to hear from you.
Contact Information
http://www.soton.ac.uk/philosophy/staff/whiting.html
Philosophy
School of Humanities
University of Southampton
Southampton
SO17 1BJ
