Jonathan Schaffer

Jonathan Schaffer is an American philosopher best known for his work on metaphysics and epistemology .

biography

Schaffer received his PhD from Rutgers University in 1999 with the thesis "Causation and the Probabilities of Processes" supervised by Brian McLaughin and David Kellogg Lewis . From 2000 to 2004 he taught at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and moved to the Australian National University in 2007 . Schaffer has been a professor at Rutgers University since 2011.

In 2008, two of Schaffer's articles were awarded prizes. The article "Knowing the Answer" received the Article Prize of the American Philosophical Association , while "From Nihilism to Monism" received the Best Paper Award from the Australasian Journal of Philosophy .

Work

metaphysics

In his metametaphysical works, Schaffer argues that the fundamental question of metaphysics concerns not the existence , but the fundamentality of entities . In contrast to many contemporary metaphysicians such as Ted Sider and Peter van Inwagen , Schaffer assumes that most metaphysical questions about existence have trivial answers. For example, there is no reason to problematize the existence of composite macroscopic objects.

At the same time, Schaffer turns against deflationary approaches in metaphysics and argues that the fundamentality of entities is the central theme of metaphysics. For example, the question arises of whether a composite object or its parts are to be understood as metaphysically primary.

In addition to this general theory of metaphysics, Schaffer takes a concrete metaphysical approach, according to which the whole is to be viewed as metaphysically primary compared to its parts. This monistic approach boils down to the thesis that with the universe as a whole there is only one metaphysically fundamental object.

Epistemology

Schaffer became known as an epistemological theorist for the fact that, following Peter Unger, he supported the thesis, which was seldom held up until then, that the attribution of knowledge can best be understood with the help of infallibilistic semantics. As a result, the sentence “S knows that P” is semantically true only if S has no possibility of error. According to this position, the more lax use of language can be explained pragmatically . Schaffer's position at the time was later referred to as “Skeptical Pragmatic Invariantism” because it proves that skepticism is correct in that knowledge ascriptions are usually semantically wrong.

In more recent epistemological work, however, Schaffer takes a contrastivist approach. Accordingly, the semantic truth depends on the attribution of knowledge, with which we contrast the content of the attribution of knowledge in the context of attribution. For example, the sentence “Anna knows that a blue tit is sitting in front of her window” may be true if the contrast is that there is no great tit sitting in front of her window, but it can be false if the contrast is that a blue tit is sitting in front of her window (namely if Anna cannot distinguish great tits from blue tits).

swell

1. ↑ Jonathan Schaffer: On What Grounds What. In: David Chalmers, David Manley, Ryan Wasserman (Eds.): Metametaphysics. New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2008, pp. 357-383.
2. ^ Ted Sider: Ontological Realism. In: David Chalmers, David Manley, Ryan Wasserman (Eds.): Metametaphysics. New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2008, pp. 384-423.
3. ↑ Peter Van Inwagen: Material Beings. Cornell University Press, Cornell 1995.
4. ↑ z. B. David Chalmers. “Ontological Anti-Realism”. In: David Chalmers, David Manley, Ryan Wasserman (Eds.): Metametaphysics. New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2008, pp. 77-129.
5. ↑ Jonathan Schaffer: Monism: The Priority of the Whole. In: The Philosophical Review. 119, No. 1 (2010), pp. 31-76.
6. ↑ Jonathan Schaffer: "Skepticism, Contextualism, and Discrimination." Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 69 (2004), 138-55.
7. ↑ Jonathan Schaffer: "From Contextualism to Contrastivism." Philosophical Studies 119 (2004), 73-103.

Web links

• Schaffer's homepage