Edward (Ed) Witherspoon

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ewitherspoon

Edward (Ed) Witherspoon

Professor of Philosophy

Department/Office Information

Philosophy
205 Hascall Hall
  • BS, Vanderbilt University, 1985
  • MA (1989), PhD (1996), University of Pittsburgh
  • Visiting assistant professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1997-98
  • Instructor, University of Pittsburgh, 1996-97
  • History of analytic philosophy
  • Epistemology
  • Philosophy of language
  • Modern philosophy
  • Twentieth-century continental philosophy
  • "Conceptions of Nonsense in Carnap and Wittgenstein," in Alice Crary and Rupert Read, eds., (The New Wittgenstein. New York: Routledge, 2000, pp. 315-349).
  • "Houses, Flowers, and Frameworks: Mulhall and Cavell on the Moral of Skepticism" (European Journal of Philosophy, 10:2, 2002, 196-208).
  • "Much Ado about the Nothing: Carnap and Heidegger on Logic and Metaphysics," in C.G. Prado, ed., A House Divided: Comparing Analytic and Continental Philosophy, Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2003.
  • "Conventions and Forms of Life," (Frederick Schmitt, ed., Socializing Metaphysics, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003).
  • "Logic and the Inexpressible in Frege and Heidegger," (Journal of the History of Philosophy, 40:1, 2002, 89-113).  Reprinted in Stephen Mulhall, ed.,  Martin Heidegger (Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2006).
  • “Wittgenstein on Criteria and the Problem of Other Minds”, in Marie McGinn and Oskari Kuusela, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Wittgenstein (Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 472-498.
  • “Wittgenstein versus Zombies: An Investigation of our Mental Concepts”, in Shyam Wuppuluri and Newton da Costa, eds., Wittgensteinian (adj.) (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2020), pp. 423-438.  Selected by the editors as the sample chapter for free download.
  • “Logic and Attunement: Reading Heidegger through Priest and Wittgenstein”, in Daniel Dahlstrom and Filippo Casati, eds., Heidegger on Logic (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022), pp. 159-181.
  • “Inner and Outer: From Skepticism to Understanding”, in Shyam Wuppuluri and A. C. Grayling, eds., Metaphors and Analogies in Sciences and Humanities. (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2022), pp. 295-318.
  • “From Deflection to Acknowledgment: Cavell on the Problem of Others”, Conversations: The Journal of Cavellian Studies 11:2 (June 2024). ISSN: 1929-6169, pp. 70-95.
  • “On Not Acknowledging an Animal’s Wounds: Reading Coetzee with Mulhall”, forthcoming in Philosophical Topics, 2025.
  • “Albritton’s Wittgenstein”, in Ali Hossein Khani and Gary Kemp, eds., Wittgenstein and Other Philosophers (Routledge: forthcoming 2025).
  • “David Hume and Sextus Empiricus on the Nature of Belief”, University of Iceland, June 2009
  • “Cavell on Skepticism and the Ordinary”, Le Moyne College, March 2010
  • “Disjunctivism versus Skepticism: The Case of McDowell versus Wright”, University of Chicago Wittgenstein Workshop, April 2010
  • “Wittgenstein’s Critique of Knowledge by Description”, University of Iceland Conference “In Wittgenstein’s Footsteps”, September 2012
  • “Brains Don’t Think”, University of St Andrews and University of Iceland, May and July 2015
  • “Wittgenstein on the Determinacy of Sense”, Kyoto University conference in honor of Graham Priest, December 2018
  • “Wittgenstein versus Zombies: An Investigation of our Mental Concepts”, Colgate University Arts and Humanities Colloquium, February 2019
  • “On Secrecy and Skepticism”, Colgate Philosophy Department Works-in-Progress series, December 2020
  • “Communication Breakdown: Private Language and its Problems”, Lehigh University, March 2022
  • “The Logic of Acknowledgment”, Colgate University Arts and Humanities Colloquium, March 2022
  • “On Not Acknowledging an Animal’s Wound”, Selfridge Conference in Honor of Stephen Mulhall, Lehigh University, April 2022
  • “The Naturalness of Second Nature”, Conference at University of Patras (Greece) entitled ‘First and Second Nature’, June 2022
  • “From Deflection to Acknowledgment: An Investigation of Skepticism about Other Minds”, Faculty Work-in-Progress Series, University of Manchester, November 2023
  • “What Can Logic Do? Reflections from Heidegger”, Colgate University Arts and Humanities Colloquium, February 2024

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