Nathan Salmon

File:Nathan Salmon.jpg

Nathan U. Salmon (ne'e Nathan Salmon Ucuzoglu) is a leading contemporary philosopher in the analytic tradition. Specializing in philosophy of language and metaphysics, he is widely regarded as the foremost philosopher of language of his generation. His former teacher and later colleague, philosopher/logician Saul Kripke, has described Salmon as "one of my best students and greatest influences on me."

Biography

Salmon was born January 2, 1951 in Los Angeles. His parents, Rebecca Ucuzoglu (ne'e Rebecca Sene) and Mario Ucuzoglu (ne'e Mair Salmon), were Sephardi Jews of Spanish-Turkish heritage. Salmon is grandson of archivist Emily Sene (ne'e Emily Perez) and oud player Isaac Sene, whose bodies of work have been described by ethnomusicologist Edwin Seroussi and are held in the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Ethnomusicology Archive. Salmon attended Lincoln School, North High School, and El Camino College, in Torrance, California, and UCLA. A self-taught, semi-professional guitarist, Salmon learned much of what he knows of music theory in middle school from his boyhood friend, music prodigy James Newton Howard.

At UCLA Salmon studied with leading contemporary philosophers/logicians Tyler Burge, Alonzo Church, Keith Donnellan, Donald Kalish, Saul Kripke, Yiannis Moschovakis, and primarily under David Kaplan. Salmon received a Ph.D. in 1979 while he was assistant professor of philosophy at Princeton University. Salmon's first book, Reference and Essence (his UCLA doctoral dissertation) won the 1984 Gustave O. Arlt Award in the Humanities, awarded by the Council of Graduate Schools in the United States. Salmon is currently distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), where he has taught since 1984.

Work

Salmon is influenced by the work of philosophers/logicians Alonzo Church, Keith Donnellan, Gottlob Frege, David Kaplan, Saul Kripke, and Bertrand Russell. Moving beyond his predecessors, Salmon is known in contemporary philosophy for, among other things:

(i) a reductio ad absurdum argument, using a sorites-like problem, against widely accepted modal logic systems S4 and S5 (in his books, Reference and Essence and Metaphysics, Mathematics, and Meaning);

(ii) a reductio ad absurdum argument against the possibility of indeterminate identity (in Reference and Essence and Metaphysics, Mathematics, and Meaning);

and for his direct-reference accounts both

(iii) of propositional attitudes and Frege's puzzle about true identifications, i.e., truths of the form "a = b" (in his books, Frege's Puzzle and Content, Cognition, and Communication); and

(iv) of problems of nonexistence and of names from fiction--in particular for his solution to the traditional problem of true, negative existentials, i.e., truths of the form "A does not exist" (in Metaphysics, Mathematics, and Meaning).

Books

• Content, Cognition, and Communication (2006). Oxford University Clarendon Press. ISBN
• Frege's Puzzle (2nd Edition) (1986). Ridgeview, Atacadero, California. ISBN 0924922052
• Metaphysics, Mathematics, and Meaning (2005). Oxford University Clarendon Press. ISBN 0199284717
• Propositions and Attitudes (1988), (co-edited with Scott Soames). Oxford University Press, New York. ISBN 0198750919
• Reference and Essence (2nd Edition) (1981). Prometheus Books, Amherst, New York. ISBN 1591022150

Selected Articles

• "Analyticity and Apriority" (1993) in Philosophical Perspectives, 7: Language and Logic, James Tomberlin, (ed). Ridgeview, Atascadero.
• "Assertion and Incomplete Definite Descriptions" (1982) Philosophical Studies 42: 37-46.
• "Being of Two Minds: Belief with Doubt" (1995) Noûs 29(1): 1-20.
• "Demonstrating and Necessity" (2002) Philosophical Review 111(4): 497-537
• "Existence" (1987) in Philosophical Perspectives, James Tomberlin (ed). Ridgeview, Atascadero.
• "The Fact That x = y" (1987) Philosophia 17: 517-518.
• "How Not to Become a Millian Heir" (1991) Philosophical Studies 165-177.
• "How Not to Derive Essentialism From the Theory of Reference" (1979) Journal of Philosophy 76: 703-725.
• "How to Become a Millian Heir" (1989) Noûs 23: 211-220.
• "How to Measure the Standard Metre" (1988) Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 88: 193-217.
• "Identity Facts" (2002) Philosophical Topics 30: 237-267.
• "Illogical Belief" (1989) in Philosophical Perspectives, 3: Philosophy of Mind and Action Theory. Ridgeview, Atascadero.
• "Impossible Worlds" (1984) in Analysis 44: 114-117.
• "The Limits of Human Mathematics" (2001) Noûs 15: 93-117.
• "The Logic of What Might Have Been" (1989) Philosophical Review 98: 3-34.
• "Modal Paradox: Parts and Counterparts, Points and Counterpoints" (1986) Midwest Studies in Philosophy 11: 75-120.
• "Mythical Objects" (2002) in Campbell, O'Rourke, and Shier, Meaning and Truth.
• "Naming, Necessity, and Beyond" (2003) Mind 112(447): 475-492.
• "Nonexistence" (1998) Noûs 32(3): 277-319.
• "On Content" (1992) Mind 101(404): 733-751.
• "The Pragmatic Fallacy" (1991) Philosophical Studies 83-97.
• "A Problem in the Frege-Church Theory of Sense and Denotation" (1993) Noûs 27(2): 158-166.
• "Reference and Information Content: Names and Descriptions" (1989) in Handbook of Philosophical Logic, D. Gabbay (ed). Kluwer, Dordrecht.
• "Reflections on Reflexivity" (1992) Linguistics and Philosophy 15(1): 53-63.
• "Reflexivity" (1986) Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 27: 401-429.
• "Relational Belief" (1995) in On Quine: New Essays, Paolo Leonardi (ed). Cabridge University Press, New York.
• "Relative and Absolute Apriority" (1993) Philosophical Studies 69(1): 83-100.
• "Review of Beyond Rigidity: The Unfinished Semantic Agenda of Naming and Necessity by Scott Soames" (2003) Mind 112(447): 475-492.
• "Tense and Intension" (2003) in Time, Tense, and Reference, Aleksander Jokic (ed). MIT Press, Cambridge.
• "Tense and Singular Propositions" (1989) in Themes From Kaplan. Oxford University Press, New York.
• "Trans-World Identification and Stipulation" (1996) Philosophical Studies 84(2-3): 203-223.
• "Wholes, Parts, and Numbers" (1997) in Philosophical Perspectives, 11, Mind, Causation, and World, James Tomberlin (ed). Blackwell, Boston.

External links

• Salmon's web page at UCSB
• Salmon's books on Amazon.com
• Salmon's musicianship