Jason Bridges

Jason Bridges received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 2001 and his B.A. from Harvard University in 1994. His primary research and teaching areas are the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language. He also has interests in metaphysics and epistemology, the philosophy of action, the later work of Wittgenstein, and political philosophy. His main current projects are about reasons and rationality, and epistemic and semantic contextualism. He has also written on logical and structural difficulties in the 'naturalization' of content, the relationship between content externalism and the rationality-involving character of psychological explanation, and issues concerning the attribution of mental states to animals.

CV (Website)

Contact

office: Stuart Hall, Room 231-C
office hours: Tuesdays, 3:00-4:30pm.
office phone: 773/834-8191
email: bridges at uchicago

Selected Publications

  • "Does Informational Semantics Commit Euthyphro's Fallacy", Nous 60 (2006): 522-547. (PDF Pre-Print)
  • "Davidson's Transcendental Externalism", Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 73 (2006): 290-315. (PDF Pre-Print)
  • "Teleofunctionalism and Psychological Explanation", Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 87 (2006), 403-321. (PDF Pre-Print)
  • "Wittgenstein vs. Semantic Contextualism," forthcoming in A.M. Ahmed (ed.), Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations: A Critical Guide, Oxford University Press. (PDF)
  • "Rule-Following Skepticism, Properly So-Called," forthcoming in Andrea Kern and James Conant (eds.), Skepticism, Meaning and Justification, Routledge Press. (PDF)
  • "Rationality, Normativity, and Transparency,"Mind 118 (2009): 353-367. (PDF)
  • Review of The Architecture of Reason, by Robert Audi
    Mind 117 (2007): 1083-1088. (Link)
  • Review of Experience and the World's Own Language: A Critique of John McDowell's Empiricism, by Richard Gaskin
    Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (2007) (Link)

Please see http://home.uchicago.edu/~bridges/ for a complete list of publications and CV.

Courses

55000 Contextualism. 
This seminar examines contextualism, understood as the thesis that the content of an utterance is shaped in far-reaching and unobvious ways by the context in which it is uttered.  Contextualism has recently become one of the most widely discussed views in contemporary philosophy of language, as well as in the philosophy of mind and epistemology.  Among other things, contextualists have argued: that contextualism spells the doom of truth-conditional semantics (as exemplified by Davidsonian theories of meaning and related formal approaches such as Montague semantics), that demonstrating the truth of contextualism was one of the central preoccupations of the later Wittgenstein, and that contextualism resolves, or at least sheds significant light on, fundamental and long-standing metaphysical and epistemological puzzles.  We will discuss all three of these claims. Spring 2009.

23705/33705 Rationality
In one sense of the term, “rationality” stands for the capacity—perhaps possessed by human beings alone among animals—to recognize and be moved by reasons.  In another sense, “rationality” names an achievement, understood variously as consisting in coherence, freedom from bias, judiciousness, dispassion, etc.  This course explores both concepts, and their joint role in structuring our attempts to understand and explain the thoughts and activities of other people and ourselves.  Topics include: the appropriateness of viewing non-human animals as rational, the role of rules or principles in thinking, the role of consistency as an ideal, the assumptions of decision theory, the structure of deliberative reflection, and the nature of irrationality. Spring 2009.

21410/31410. Philosophy of Action
Open to college and grad students.   In this course we address a group of related philosophical questions about human agency. What is the ontological relationship between actions and bodily movements---between, e.g., my moving my arm and my arm's moving? What distinguishes between cases of bodily movement in which there is an action on the part of the person and cases in which there is not? Is our everyday practice of explaining people's actions in terms of their beliefs and aims threatened by the possibility of physical explanations of the motions of their bodies? How, if at all, do the concepts of reason and rationality structure our explanations of human activity? How is weakness of the will possible? What is the relationship between the concepts of agency and freedom? Readings are drawn from a wide variety of contemporary sources.   Autumn 2003. 

23401/33401. Philosophy of Mind: Thought, Community, EnvironmentOpen to college and grad students.   It seems natural to think of the mind as an autonomous object: subject to causal influence from the world outside, but possessed, like a clock or other physical mechanism, of its own self-standing internal constitution. Over the last half-century, however, a number of philosophers have articulated and defended views in radical conflict with that conception. According to such views, our minds are not merely in causal contact with the world; rather, the very existence and identity of our thoughts and beliefs are partially constituted by our relationships to the physical and social environment. In this course, we critically examine the most influential arguments of this kind in the analytic tradition, and consider the philosophical fall-out from the 'externalist' revolution for issues of self-knowledge, skepticism, language, and naturalism. Readings will be drawn from Davidson, Dretske, Evans, Fodor, McDowell, Putnam, Wittgenstein and others. 

29600. Junior Seminar
Open to college students. Prerequisites: Open only to third-year students who have been admitted to the intensive concentration program. .  Topics for this small, discussion-oriented seminar vary.   Autumn  2004.

54003. Moral Psychology
Open to grad students.   This seminar addresses topics at the intersection of ethics and the philosophy of mind. It draws on readings from both the early modern and contemporary period. The key early modern figures are Hobbes and Hume: we will look closely at their conceptions of reason and of its relationship to ethics. Contemporary ethicists and philosophers of action often claim a kinship between their views and those of these earlier figures, especially Hume; we will evaluate these claims and also consider the contemporary views on their own terms. Central issues include the idea of a reason for action, the question of whether moral principles play a distinctive role in the motivation of action, and the nature of akrasia (weakness of the will).    Spring 2005.

20100/30000. Elementary Logic
Basic knowledge of concepts and principles of symbolic logic. Course not for field credit. An introduction to the concepts and principles of symbolic logic.  We learn the syntax and semantics of truth-functional and first-order quantificational logic, and apply the resultant conceptual framework to the analysis of valid and invalid arguments, the structure of formal languages, and logical relations among sentences of ordinary discourse.  Occasionally we will venture into topics in philosophy of language and philosophical logic, but our primary focus is on acquiring a facility with symbolic logic as such. Autumn 2002, Autumn 2005, Autumn 2006. Autumn 2009.