Sean Ebels Duggan

Mainly I work in philosophy of logic and mathematics, with an eye toward the work of Immanuel Kant and the history of analytic philosophy. But a lot of philosophy interests me, and I often find myself writing a paper on a topic just because I thought it was interesting.

My interest in philosophy of logic stems from the conviction that many epistemological questions, and questions in the philosophy of mind, cannot be answered fully without a clear understanding of the nature of logic and its role in constituting and governing belief. This is reflected in my dissertation, which investigates the link between the ground of logical truth and the status of logic as providing norms for belief. One way of thinking about logical norms (put roughly) is that we are criticizable for transgressing logical norms for belief regardless of what the world is like. This tends to favor a view of logical truth that locates its ground in necessary features of thought (though not in a psychologistic sense) or representation.  I look at the development of this view, or something like it, in Kant's theoretical philosophy and Wittgenstein's Tractatus, and how "necessary features of thought or representation" must be understood if the view is to succeed. A summary of the dissertatin (one that benefits from some hindsight) is included in this research summary. It also gives a sense of the other things I like to think about.

In addition to these, I am interested in a broad range of philosophical questions, in the history of early analytic philosophy (and more broadly the history of philosophy, analytic, continental, and otherwise, in the period from about 1860-1930), "naturalism" in philosophical method and its opponents, the nature of belief and its relation to content, epistemology generally as well as the epistemology of religious belief, and the development of philosophy of language, logic, mathematics, and science in the early modern period through Kant.

I have some current papers listed on my CV; copies are available upon request. I've also posted an obscure logic paper below for the interested insomniac.

Propositional adequacy, independence, and incommensurability.