JAMES A. WOODBRIDGE

 

Las Vegas, September 2006
This page contains information about


1. About Me

I am a recent transplant to Las Vegas and an Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department at UNLV. In the Fall term of 2008 I am teaching Philosophy of Language and Introduction to Philosophy. During Spring 2008 I taught Symbolic (a.k.a. Mathematical) Logic and Introduction to Symbolic Logic. And in Fall 2007 I taught a course on Theories of Truth and one section of Critical Thinking. Before coming to UNLV, I was a reluctant academic nomad, teaching at such institutions as Yale University (2005-6), The University of Michigan (2004-5), The College of William and Mary (2001-4), and New York University (1999-2001). I've taught a variety of classes at these different places, including Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Science, Metaphysics, Ethics, and a First-Year Seminar on Relativism.

I am (in origin and demeanor) a northeasterner. I grew up in Glastonbury, Connecticut but managed to escape the suburbs every summer at Camp Quinebarge in New Hampshire, where I spent most of my time hiking in the White Mountains. I did an undergraduate degree at Amherst College in Massachusetts where I also devoted a lot of time to singing, both in the men's Glee Club and in an a cappella group called the DQ. During my college years I spent three summers living in a tent and working outrageous hours at the Columbia Wards salmon fishery in Kenai, Alaska. After graduating from Amherst with a double major in philosophy and physics, I spent a year traveling around the world, mostly in New Zealand, Australia, China, Thailand, Nepal, India, Italy, Germany, and Croatia. When I got back to the U.S. I lived in Boston for two years and worked as a research technician at the Harvard School of Public Health. My (rather strange) job there was to make computer models of human and dog rib cages for use in the study of respiratory mechanics. (Here is an abstract.) From Boston I moved to Ann Arbor to pursue a graduate degree in philosophy at the University of Michigan (Go Blue). I relocated to NYC in 1998 and then (after completing my Ph.D.) moved to Virginia in 2001 to teach at William & Mary. Three years later I returned to Ann Arbor to spend a year teaching for my old alma mater (Go Blue, uh, again). After that, I ended up back in my old home state of CT for a year, teaching at Yale. Now here I am in the middle of a desert, in the craziest city on earth.

2. My Interests

Outside of academic pursuits, one of my main interests has been rock climbing (here are some pictures), although unfortunately that's been on hold for a while (but hooray! for Red Rock Canyon!). I used to fool around with beer brewing, but I don't really do much of that anymore. My main interest these days is music, mostly "indie" rock (as in The Shins, The Fiery Furnaces, Yo La Tengo) and early 70s rock (as in Zeppelin (of course), T. Rex, Big Star), blues, post-war jazz, real country music (as in Hank Williams, Loretta Lynn, Johnny Cash), and blugrass/old time. I now book indie rock shows in several venues in Downtown Las Vegas, under the guise of MetaMetaProductions. I also like movies from the 30's and 40's, traveling(!), and camping. And then, of course, there are Scout and Amelia's dog, Remington.

3. What I Work On

My philosophical interests include the philosophy of language and mind, metaphysics, and philosophical logic. I mainly focus on the topic of truth and have developed a novel version of deflationism. This general approach is really more an analysis of truth-talk (the fragment of language that employs the notion of truth) than one of truth itself, but it has implications for that more traditional issue. Deflationism holds that all of our uses of truth-talk are explained by the fact that it generates the instances of the equivalence schema: it is true that p if and only if p. The instances of this schema are explanatorily and conceptually basic, in the sense that they follow just from how truth-talk operates (logico-linguisitically) rather than from the underlying nature of some property of truth. Deflationism thus denies that truth-talk functions to describe anything (e.g., a statement or a belief) or to attribute any kind of substantial relation (more on this here). According to deflationism, the only purposes truth-talk really serves are certain logical or pragmatic ones. The deflationary approach I have developed is a kind of fictionalism about truth-talk, one that sees this way of talking as part of an established, rule-governed semantic pretense. Truth-talk is a pretense-based figure of speech we employ in order make certain non-semantic claims (in particular, a certain kind of general claim) we could not otherwise make.

My curriculum vitae has more information about my work and background.

My paper "Truth as a Pretense" lays out the basic details of my version of deflationism. A (much) shorter "talk-version" is available here.
And the full-length dissertation version is available here.

Other recent papers:

4. My Teaching

At University of Nevada, Las Vegas: At Yale University: At The University of Michigan: At The College of William and Mary: At New York University:

5. Philosophy Web Sites


You can contact me at:



Last updated July 25, 2008
This site is maintained by James A. Woodbridge

This document was created on September 3, 1997.