Research Interests

My primary philosophical interests lie in the field of metaphysics. As far as secondary interests go, I vary between epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science. I tend to take as a starting point the thoughts of the early modern philosophers, so I have interests there as well, particularly with respect to a priori knowledge, substance, identity, personal identity, and freedom and determinism.

As for particular topics, my dissertation was on the nature of concepts, more specifically on the so-called classical view of concepts, and my project defended that traditional pillar of analytic philosophy. I'm interested in universals, particularly with respect to epistemic objections to platonism. I have also been thinking about arguments (both against the classical view and in favor of prototype views of concepts) appealing to various facts about categorization. As a defender of the classical (or "definitional") view of concepts, I'm interested in the nature of analysis, the paradox of analysis, and what the logical structure of concepts would have to be like. I'm not the sort of classical theorist who thinks that complex concepts literally have concepts from their analysantia within them as proper parts, but I do go in for a view where complex concepts have logical constituents corresponding to those concepts appearing in their analysantia. I've also been wondering about the notion of ontological dependence, both for concepts and for other sorts of universals, and especially with respect to the notion of mind-dependence.

 

Dennis Earl (email: dearl@coastal.edu)
Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies
Coastal Carolina University
P.O. Box 261954
Conway, SC 29528-6054
Last Modified August 12, 2009