Denison: Sam Wheeler, Prof. of Philosophy, Univ. of Connecticut

The Denison University Department of Philosophy welcomes Sam Wheeler III, a professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut, presenting a lecture, ?Pluralist Essentialism: How Davidson, Aristotle and Kripke Are All Partly Right,? at 3:30 p.m. on Friday, March 27, in room 210 of the Samson Talbot Hall (350 Ridge Road). The lecture is sponsored by the Titus-Hepp Lecture Series and is free and open to the public. For more information, contact Kate Tull at 740-587-6387 or visit Denison.edu. Donald Davidson?s externalism and principle of charity imply that he should have been a kind of essentialist, agreeing with Aristotle, Kripke and others that there are de remodal truths about entities. Given that, as Davidson said, ?sameness is always relative to a predicate,? entities should be regarded as articulations of what is, albeit articulations that are not given, but imposed in order to allow us to make inferences that depend on sub-sentential structure. Just as space does not come divided into feet as opposed to meters, so the world does not come divided into just one set of kinds of object. Wheeler, a Granville native and son of Denison University physics professor Samuel C. Wheeler, writes in philosophy of language, metaphysics, ethics, deconstruction, and ancient philosophy. He published ?Neo-Davidsonian Metaphysics? in 2013 and is currently working on a book on modality.