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Cappelen and Dever present a forceful challenge to the standard view that perspective, and in particular the perspective of the first person, is a philosophically deep aspect of the world. Their goal is not to show that we need to explain indexical and other perspectival phenomena in different ways, but to show that the entire topic is an illusion.
List of contents
- 1: Introductory Overview: The Role of Indexicality, Perspective and the De Se in Philosophy
- 2: Preliminaries: Language-Mind, Super Indexicals, and Opacity
- 3: Indexicality, the De Se, and Agency
- 4: Indexicality, Opacity, and Fregeanism
- 5: Lewis on the De Se, Self-Ascription, and Centered Worlds
- 6: Functionalism to the Rescue?
- 7: Indexicality and Immunity to Error
- 8: A Brief Note on Perceptual Content and the De Se
- 9: The De Se and the Semantics of PRO Constructions
- 10: The View From Everywhere
About the author
Herman Cappelen is a professor of philosophy at the University of St Andrews, where he works at the Arché Philosophical Research Centre. He works in philosophy of language, philosophical methodology and related areas of epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind. He is the author of many papers and four books: Insensitive Semantics (with Ernest Lepore; Blackwell, 2004), Language Turned on Itself (with Ernest Lepore; OUP, 2007), Relativism and Monadic Truth (with John Hawthorne; OUP, 2009), and Philosophy without Intuitions (OUP, 2012).
; Josh Dever is Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He completed his PhD at the University of California at Berkeley, and his primary research interests include philosophy of language and philosophical logic.
Summary
Cappelen and Dever present a forceful challenge to the standard view that perspective, and in particular the perspective of the first person, is a philosophically deep aspect of the world. Their goal is not to show that we need to explain indexical and other perspectival phenomena in different ways, but to show that the entire topic is an illusion.
Additional text
This is a brave and fascinating book in terms of how it takes on a longstanding and largely unchallenged tradition. The book succeeds in its stated aim to show that arguments put forward in favour of essential indexicality are often shallow and border on the rhetorical, and that the notion of perspective probably has little philosophical mileage.
