Sydney Shoemaker
Sydney S. Shoemaker | |
---|---|
Born | September 29, 1931 Representationalism |
Institutions | Cornell University |
Doctoral advisor | Norman Malcolm[1] |
Main interests | Philosophy of mind, metaphysics |
Notable ideas | Immunity to error through misidentification Quasi-memory |
Sydney Sharpless Shoemaker (September 29, 1931 – September 3, 2022) was an American
Education and career
Shoemaker graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from Reed College and earned his Doctor of Philosophy from Cornell University in 1958[2] under the supervision of Norman Malcolm.[3] He taught philosophy at Ohio State University from 1957 to 1960 then, in 1961, returned to Cornell as a faculty member of the philosophy department. In 1978 he was appointed the Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy, a position he held until his retirement, as professor emeritus of Philosophy.[4]
In 1971, he delivered the
Shoemaker died on September 3, 2022, at the age of 90. He was buried in Greensprings Natural Cemetery Preserve in Newfield.[5]
Philosophical work
Shoemaker worked primarily in the philosophy of mind and metaphysics, and published many classic papers in both of these areas (as well as their overlap). In "Functionalism and Qualia" (1975), for example, he argued that functionalism about mental states can account for the qualitative character (or 'raw feel') of mental states. In "Self-Reference and Self-Awareness" (1968), he argued that the phenomenon of absolute 'immunity to error through misidentification' is what distinguishes self-attributions of mental states (such as "I see a canary") from self-attributions of physical states (such as "I weigh 200 pounds").
In metaphysics, he defended the view that laws are metaphysically necessary, a position that follows from his view of properties as clusters of conditional
Selected publications
Books
- Self-Knowledge and Self-Identity (1963).
- Personal Identity (co-authored with Richard Swinburne) (1984).
- Identity, Cause and Mind: Philosophical Essays (1984).
- The First-Person Perspective, and other Essays (1996).[7]
- Physical Realization (2007).
Articles
- 1970, "Persons and their Pasts", American Philosophical Quarterly, pp. 269–85.
- 1988, "On Knowing One's Own Mind", Philosophical Perspectives, pp. 183–209.
See also
References
- ^ "History of the Sage School | Sage School of Philosophy". philosophy.cornell.edu. Retrieved 2022-09-29.
- ^ Larry Bernard (May 6, 1996), "Three Cornell faculty members are elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences", Cornell Chronicle.
- ^ "History of the Sage School | Sage School of Philosophy Cornell Arts & Sciences". philosophy.cornell.edu. Retrieved 2021-03-15.
Sydney Shoemaker and Carl Ginet have been working in metaphysics and epistemology at Cornell since the late 1960s and early 1970s. Both did their graduate work at Cornell – Shoemaker with Norman Malcolm and Ginet with John Rawls. Although Shoemaker studied Wittgenstein with Malcolm early on, his work reflects the realism and lack of discomfort with metaphysics that characterized analytic philosophy more generally beginning in the 1960s.
- ISBN 9780199754663.
- ^ "Sydney Shoemaker". Ithaca Journal. Retrieved 16 September 2022.
- S2CID 6829580.
- .