Gilbert Harman

Gilbert Harman (* 1938 ) is an American philosopher . He teaches at Princeton University and publishes on ethics , epistemology , metaphysics, and the philosophies of language and mind . The thinker developed, among other things, a very influential position on the philosophy of logic, which strongly separates logical and psychological processes from one another and denies their normative analogisability.

Life

Harman studied at Swarthmore College and Harvard University , where he received his PhD in philosophy in 1964 . His daughter, Elizabeth Harman , is also a philosopher and works at the Philosophical Institute and the Center for Human Values at Princeton University.

plant

With his doctoral supervisor Willard Van Orman Quine , Harman shares both the view that there is a smooth transition between philosophy and (natural) science , as well as his skepticism regarding the philosophical analysis of concepts . Harman advocates a semantics of conceptual roles ( CRS ) that understand the structure and function of concepts inferentially.

The thinker denies that there are resilient bridging principles between logic and mathematics on the one hand and the everyday weighing of reasons on the other. This goes hand in hand with the position that logic cannot have any normativity in relation to everyday thinking.

As a moral philosopher , Harman gained fame primarily through his contributions to anti-realism and ethical relativism . A comprehensive presentation of his moral positions can be found in his work Moral Relativism and Moral Objectivity , published in 1996 , in which Judith Jarvis Thomson , one of his critics, also has a say.

In 2005, Harman was awarded the Jean Nicod Prize in Paris and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Publications

Monographs:

• Thought. Princeton, 1973, ISBN 0-691-07188-8 .
• The Nature of Morality: An Introduction to Ethics. Oxford, 1977, ISBN 0-19-502143-6 .
• Change in View: Principles of Reasoning. MIT, 1986, ISBN 0-262-58091-8 .
• Skepticism and the Definition of Knowledge. Garland, 1990, ISBN 1-315-05662-3 .
• with Judith Jarvis Thomson : Moral Relativism and Moral Objectivity. Blackwell, 1996, ISBN 0-631-19211-5 .
• Reasoning, Meaning and Mind. Clarendon, 1999, ISBN 0-19-823802-9 .
• Explaining Value and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy. Clarendon, 2000, ISBN 0-19-823804-5 .
• with Sanjeev Kulkarni: Reliable Reasoning: Induction and Statistical Learning Theory. MIT Press, 2007, ISBN 978-0-262-08360-7 .

Editorships:

• with Donald Davidson : Semantics of Natural Language. D. Reidel, 1972, ISBN 90-277-0304-3 .
• On Noam Chomsky : Critical Essays. Anchor, 1974, ISBN 0-385-03765-1 .
• with Donald Davidson: The Logic of Grammar. Dickenson, 1975, ISBN 0-8221-0143-2 .
• Conceptions of the Human Mind: Essays in Honor of George A. Miller . Laurence Erlbaum, 1993, ISBN 0-8058-1234-2 .
• with Ernie Lepore: A Companion to WVO Quine. Blackwell, 2014, ISBN 978-0-470-67210-5 .

supporting documents

1. ^ Gilbert Harman: Change in view. MIT Press, Cambridge / London 1986, pp. 19-20.
2. ^ Gilbert Harman: Internal Critique: A Logic is not a Theory of Reasoning and a Theory of Reasoning is not a Logic. In: DM Gabbay , RH Johnson, HJ Ohlbach, J. Woods (Eds.): Handbook of the Logic of Argument and Inference: The Turn Towards the Practical. (= Studies in Logic and Practical Reasoning. Volume 1). Elsevier Science BV, Amsterdam 2002, p. 180.

Web links

• Harman's official website at Princeton University (English)
• Literature by and about Gilbert Harman in the catalog of the German National Library