Herman Cappelen

Herman Wright Cappelen (born 1967) is a Norwegian philosopher teaching at the University of St Andrews in Scotland and working at the Center for the Study of Mind in Nature at the University of Oslo. His main areas of research include philosophy of language, philosophical methodology and related areas in epistemology, philosophy of mind, and metaphysics. In 2013, he became editor of the journal Inquiry. Cappelen is the son of author and publisher Peder Wright Cappelen and actress Kari Simonsen.

Education

Cappelen received a BA in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from the University of Oxford, Balliol College, in 1989. In 1996, Cappelen received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. The title of his dissertation was "The Metaphysics of Words and the Semantics of Quotation". His advisors were Charles Chihara, Stephen Neale, and John Searle.

Academic career

Since 2007 Cappelen has been a Professor at the University of St Andrews where he holds an Arché Chair. He has previously held positions at Somerville College, Oxford, University of Oslo, and Vassar College. He has been the Director of the Arché Philosophical Research Centre and a co-investigator of two research projects funded by longterm AHRC grants: "Contextualism and Relativism" and "Intuitions and Philosophical Methodology". Cappelen was one of the original applicants for the research center Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature (Norwegian Centre of Excellence) at the University of Oslo, where he is director of research and co-director of the Linguistic Agency component. Cappelen has been a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters since 2008.

Cappelen's most influential work is the 2004 book, Insensitive Semantics (written with Ernie Lepore). The book defends a minimal role for context in semantics and advocates speech act pluralism. It is one of the most cited works in philosophy within the last 10 years.

Cappelen has argued that the role of intuition in Western analytic philosophy is overstated. His 2012 book, Philosophy without Intuitions, argues that intuition plays a minor role - or no role at all - in most modern philosophy, and the fear that intuition is widespread has been damaging. His claim that the role of intuitions is overstated is controversial, and has been hotly debated.

Publications

Monographs:

• "The Inessential Indexical: On the Philosophical Insignificance of Perspective and the First Person" (with Josh Dever), Oxford University Press, 2013, ISBN 978-0-19-968674-2 [1]
• Philosophy without Intuitions, Oxford University Press, 2012, ISBN 978-0-19-964486-5 [2]
• Relativism and Monadic Truth (with John Hawthorne), Oxford University Press, 2009, 978-0-19-956055-4 [3]
• Language Turned on Itself: The Semantics and Pragmatics of Metalinguistic Discourse (with Ernest Lepore), Oxford University Press, 2007, ISBN 978-0-19-923119-5 [4]
• Insensitive Semantics: A Defense of Semantic Minimalism and Speech Act Pluralism (with Ernest Lepore), Wiley-Blackwell, 2004, ISBN 978-1-4051-2675-5 [5]

Edited Volumes:

• "The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology" (with Tamar Szabo Gendler and John Hawthorne), Oxford University Press, forthcoming
• "Assertion: New Philosophical Essays" (with Jessica Brown), Oxford University Press, 2011, ISBN 978-0-19-957300-4 [6]

Several papers.

External links

• Staff Homepage at the University of St Andrews
• Interview with 3AM Magazine