Richard Gaskin

This article is about the philosopher. For other uses, see Richard Gaskin (disambiguation).

Richard Maxwell Gaskin
Born	(1960-05-08) 8 May 1960 Glasgow, United Kingdom
Education	University College Oxford
Region	Western philosophy
School	Analytic philosophy
Institutions	University of Liverpool University of Sussex University of Oxford
Main interests	Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Literature, Metaphysics, Ancient Philosophy, History of Philosophy, Logic

Richard Maxwell Gaskin (born 1960) is a British philosopher and Professor at the University of Liverpool. He has particular interests in Philosophy of Language and Philosophy of Literature, and has published widely on the theory of linguistic idealism and the philosophy of literature, as well as on Metaphysics, Ancient Philosophy, the History of Philosophy, and Logic. Gaskin received his BA, B. Phil, and D. Phil in Classics and Philosophy at University College, Oxford, and has held academic posts at St. Edmund Hall, Oxford as well as the University of Sussex.

Gaskin is the author of numerous books and published articles, including Language and World: A Defence of Linguistic Idealism (2020), Tragedy and Redress in Western Literature: a Philosophical Perspective (2018), Horace and Housman (2013), Language, Truth, and Literature: a Defence of Literary Humanism (2013), The Unity of the Proposition (2008), Experience and the World's Own Language: a Critique of John McDowell's Empiricism (2006) . Though his work is mainly philosophical, he has also written extensively on classical and English literature.

Early life, education, and career

Gaskin was born in 1960 in Scotland, the son of Professor Maxwell Gaskin, then holder of the Jaffrey Chair in Political Economy at the University of Aberdeen. Gaskin attended Robert Gordon's College, Aberdeen. He went on to study Literae Humaniores (Classics and Philosophy) at University College, Oxford. At Oxford he won a Gladstone Scholarship, and took a 'double first': a first-class degree in Honour Moderations in 1980 (with distinction in Greek), followed by a first-class degree in Literae Humaniores in 1982. While at Oxford he directed a production of Marlowe’s Dr Faustus at the Oxford Playhouse in March 1981, and was secretary of the Oxford University Dramatic Society from 1981–82. He also, as part of the 'Oxford Arrogance' company, directed a performance of Racine’s Berenice at Aberdeen and the Edinburgh Fringe.

Having finished his undergraduate education at Oxford, Gaskin spent a year (1982-83) teaching Classics and English at Leicester Grammar School, before moving to the Warburg Institute, University of London, to spend a year (1983-1984) in postgraduate study there of Renaissance Philosophy, Literature, and Humanism.

After completing his time at London, Gaskin returned to Oxford to continue his studies in Philosophy. He passed the famously difficult BPhil exam with Distinction in 1986, choosing as his subjects Philosophical Logic, Metaphysics and the Theory of Knowledge, and Wittgenstein. The title of his thesis was 'Some Aspects of Realism', and it was supervised by John McDowell, then Fellow in Philosophy at University College. He then won the prestigious post of Claude Jenkyns Junior Research Fellow, at St. Edmund Hall, Oxford. While holding this post he taught on a wide variety of subjects including Logic, Metaphysics and the Theory of Knowledge, Moral and Political Philosophy, Wittgenstein, Kant, Cicero, and Virgil. Simultaneously with doing this he was studying for a DPhil, under the supervision of Michael Dummett, then Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford, with support from David Wiggins, and Barry Stroud. While at Oxford he also won the 1987 Gaisford Prize for dissertation in classical literature for his essay 'Tragedy and Subjectivity in Virgil’s Aeneid'. Gaskin was awarded the D. Phil in 1988, for a thesis titled Experience, Agency, and the Self .

His Junior Research Fellowship at St Edmund Hall continued, but, since he had now completed his DPhil, Gaskin spent 1988–89 as an Alexander von Humboldt visiting fellow at the University of Mainz, Germany, researching decision-making in classical literature under Antonie Wlosok, a well-known German scholar of Virgil. After leaving Mainz, Gaskin went to Cambridge, where he spent the year 1989-90 studying German and Law, with a view to becoming a barrister. In the event, he decided that the law was not for him, and in 1991, when his position at St Edmund Hall expired, he took up a position as Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Sussex, being promoted Reader with effect from 1997. While at Sussex, he spent two periods (1992 and 1994) as a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, two periods (1994 and 1996) holding a British Academy scholarship at the Fondation Hardt pour l’étude de l’antiquité classique in Geneva, and two periods at the University of Bonn, once (1995–6) as an Alexander von Humboldt Visiting Fellow, and once (1998) as a DAAD Research Fellow at the Seminar für Logik und Grundlagen-forschung . In 2001 he became Professor at the University of Liverpool, a position he still holds.

Philosophical work

Linguistic Idealism

Linguistic idealism is the thesis that, in some sense, the (non-linguistic) world is produced by, or depends on, language. The dependence is supposed to be asymmetric: the non-linguistic world depends on language in a way in which language does not depend on the world (even though it does depend on the world in a different way). The dependence is not temporal: Gaskin does not assert that there was a time at which language existed, but the world did not. It is, rather, logical and constitutive: Gaskin asserts that objects such as tables and chairs exist in virtue of, and are constituted as objects by, the existence of sentences about them. Gaskin's work has consistently explored and defended this thesis. In particular, he has defended it against some difficult objections. In his Tragedy and Redress in Western Literature: A Philosophical Perspective Gaskin responds to the objection that the tragic aspects of life are beyond language; he argues that they are not. In Language and World Gaskin responds to the objection that some mathematical entities, in particular uncomputable sets of real numbers, cannot be named in language. His response is to develop a split-level version of linguistic idealism, according to which all the basic entities of the world can be named in language, even if certain further entities not nameable in language can then be derived from the basic entities.

Other philosophical interests

Gaskin has also written on the metaphysics of relations, whether the future is determined by fate, and the question whether there are truths about what free agents would have done in counterfactual circumstances. He has written numerous articles in the history of philosophy, and a book-length treatment of the empiricism of one of his influences, his university tutor John McDowell. He has written articles in German, as well as in English.

Literary Criticism

Gaskin's expertise in analytic philosophy is coupled with an interest in, and sensitivity to, literature. He has a particular interest in the 'paradox of tragedy', the question why it is that we seem to get pleasure from watching on stage or on the screen events that would greatly distress us in real life. He has also defended the thesis that authors have no privileged access over the reader to the meaning of their works. In addition to his writings in philosophy of literature, he has written a study of the poets Horace and Housman, and the work for which he won the Gaisford Prize at the University of Oxford was an essay entitled 'Tragedy and Subjectivity in Virgil’s Aeneid'. He has also written on Homer, the classicist Richard Bentley, and the essayist Charles Lamb.

Gaskin is himself a poet, and has translated into English verse selections from Apollonius of Rhodes's Greek poem Argonautica (Edinburgh: Leerie Press, 1995). His Web site featuring his readings of verse (and some prose items) also reflects this interest.

Publications

Books

Language and world: a Defence of Linguistic Idealism (London/New York: Routledge, forthcoming 2020). ISBN 978-0-367-90258-2.

Tragedy and Redress in Western Literature: a Philosophical Perspective (London/New York: Routledge, 2018). ISBN 978-1-138-49808-2.

Horace and Housman (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). ISBN 978-1-137-36292-6.

Language, Truth, and Literature: a Defence of Literary Humanism (Oxford: OUP, 2013). ISBN 978-0-198-77689-5.

The Unity of the Proposition (Oxford: OUP, 2008). ISBN 978-0-199-23945-0.

Experience and the World’s Own Language: a Critique of John McDowell’s Empiricism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006). ISBN 978-0-199-28725-3.

Grammar in Early Twentieth-Century Philosophy, edited collection with contributions from Stewart Candlish, Gary Ebbs, Richard Gaskin, James Levine, Richard Mendelsohn, Alex Oliver, Graham Priest, Ian Proops, Bede Rundle und Peter Simons (London: Routledge, 2001). ISBN 978-0-415-40845-5

Simplicius on Aristotle Categories 9–15, an annotated translation of Simplicius’ commentary on Aristotle’s Categories, chs. 9–15 (London: Duckworth, 2000). ISBN 978-0-715-62900-0.

The Sea Battle and the Master Argument: Aristotle and Diodorus Cronus on the Metaphysics of the Future (Berlin/ New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1995). ISBN 978-3-11-014430-7.

Selected articles

On being pessimistic about the end of the Aeneid, forthcoming in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology .

A Defence of the Resemblance Meaning of “What it’s like”, Mind 128, 2019, 673–98. DOI 10.1093/mind/fzx023.

From the unity of the proposition to linguistic idealism, Synthese 196, 2019, 1325–42. DOI 10.1007/s11229-016-1081-5.

Identity and Reference in a Black Universe, in P. Stalmaszczyk ed., Philosophical and Linguistic Analyses of Reference (Frankfurt: Lang, 2016), 19–41. DOI 10.3726/978-3-653-05429-3.

The Identity Theory of Truth, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, published May 1, 2015.

Meaning, Normativity, and Naturalism, in B. Dainton and H. Robinson eds., The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Philosophy (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 230–54. ISBN 978-1-474-23648-5.

Reach’s Puzzle and Mention (co-authored with Daniel Hill), Dialectica 67, 2013, 201–22. DOI 10.1111/1746-8361.12021.

When Logical Atomism met the Theaetetus: Ryle on Naming and Saying, in M. Beaney ed., The Oxford Handbook of the History of Analytic Philosophy (Oxford: OUP, 2013), 851–69. DOI 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199238842.013.0037.

On Neutral Relations (co-authored with Daniel Hill), Dialectica 66, 2012, 167–86. DOI 10.1111/j.1746-8361.2012.01294.x.

Reference and the Permutation Argument, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 111, 2011, 295–309. DOI 10.1111/j.1467-9264.2011.00310.x.

The Unity of the Proposition: Reply to Denyer, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 88, 2011, 729–30. DOI 10.1080/00048402.2010.511649.

Bentley’s classicism, Paradise Lost, and the Schema Horatianum, International Journal of the Classical Tradition 17, 2010, 354–65. DOI 10.2307/40931338.

The Unity of the Proposition: Replies to Vallicella, Schnieder, and García-Carpintero, Dialectica 64, 2010, 259–64 and 303–11 (Book symposium on The Unity of the Proposition). DOI 10.1111/j.1746-8361.2009.01212.x

Realism and the Picture Theory of Meaning, Philosophical Topics 37, 2009, 49–62. DOI 10.5840/philtopics200937115.

Bradleys Regress und die Einheit der Proposition, Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 57, 2009, 575–82. DOI 10.1524/dzph.2009.57.4.575.

John Wyclif and the Theory of Complexly Signifiables, Vivarium 47, 2009, 74–96. DOI 10.1163/156853408X345927.

Complexe Significabilia and Aristotle’s Categories, in J. Biard und I. Rosier-Catach eds., La Tradition Médiévale des Catégories (Louvain: Peeters, 2003), 187–205. ISBN 90-429-1335-5.

Proposition and World, Introduction to R. Gaskin ed., Grammar in Early Twentieth-Century Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2001), 1–27. ISBN 978-0-415-40845-5.

Nonsense and Necessity in Wittgenstein’s Mature Philosophy, in R. Gaskin ed., Grammar in Early Twentieth-Century Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2001), 199–217. ISBN 978-0-415-40845-5.

Ockham’s Mental Language, Connotation, and the Inherence Regress, in D. Perler ed., Ancient and Medieval Theories of Intentionality (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 227–63. ISBN 978-9-004-12295-6.

Do Homeric Heroes make Real Decisions? (revised version of 1990 CQ paper), in D. Cairns ed., Oxford Readings on Homer’s Iliad (Oxford: Clarendon, 2001), 147–65. ISBN 978-0-198-72182-6.

Die Einheit der Aussage, in U. Meixner ed., Metaphysik im postmetaphysischen Zeitalter/Metaphysics in the Post-Metaphysical Age (Vienna: öbv, 2001), 305–10. ISBN 978-3-209-03194-5.

Tense Logic and the Master Argument, Philosophiegeschichte und logische Analyse 2, 1999, 202–24. DOI 10.30965/26664275-00201015.

Predication and Ontology: Reply to Denyer, Philosophy 73, 1998, 625–9. DOI 10.1017/S0031819198004082.

The Unity of the Declarative Sentence, Philosophy 73, 1998, 21–45. DOI 10.1017/S0031819197000065.

Fatalism, Bivalence, and the Past, Philosophical Quarterly 48, 1998, 83–8. DOI10.1111/1467-9213.00083.

Fatalism, Middle Knowledge, and Comparative Similarity of Worlds, Religious Studies 34, 1998, 189–203. DOI 10.1017/S0034412598004338.

Simplicius on the Meaning of Sentences: a Commentary on In Cat. 396,30–397,28, Phronesis 43, 1998, 42–62. DOI 10.1163/15685289860517793.

“Socrates is identical”: Wittgenstein and Categorical Nonsense, in P. Weingartner et al. eds., The Role of Pragmatics in Contemporary Philosophy: Papers of the 20th International Wittgenstein Symposium vol. 5 (Kirchberg, 1997), 273–8.

Peter Damian on Divine Power and the Contingency of the Past, British Journal of the History of Philosophy 5, 1997, 229–47. DOI 10.1080/09608789708570965.

Russell and Richard Brinkley on the Unity of the Proposition, History and Philosophy of Logic 18, 1997, 139–50. DOI 10.1080/01445349708837284.

Überlegungen zur Identitätstheorie der Prädikation, Wissenschaft und Weisheit 60, 1997, 87–103.

Peter of Ailly and other Fourteenth-Century Thinkers on Divine Power and the Necessity of the Past, Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 79, 1997, 273–91. DOI 10.1515/agph.1997.79.3.273.

The Stoics on Cases, Predicates and the Unity of the Proposition, in Aristotle and After ed. R. Sorabji (London: Institute of Classical Studies, 1997), 91–108. DOI 10.1111/j.2041-5370.1997.tb02264.x.

Fregean Sense and Russellian Propositions, Philosophical Studies 86, 1997, 131–54. DOI 10.1023/A:1017929320501

Reconstructing the Master Argument of Diodorus Cronus: Response to Denyer, Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 78, 1996, 181–91.

“Kein Etwas, aber auch nicht ein Nichts!”: kann die Grammatik tatsächlich täuschen?, Grazer Philosophische Studien 51, 1996, 85–104.

Sea Battles, Worn-out Cloaks, and Other Matters of Interpretation: Weidemann on Aristotle’s Peri Hermeneias, Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 78, 1996, 48–60. DOI 10.1515/agph.1996.78.1.48.

Truth, Fiction, and Literature, British Journal of Aesthetics 35,1995, 395–401. DOI 10.1093/bjaesthetics/35.4.395.

Middle Knowledge: Reply to Rice, Philosophical Quarterly 45, 1995, 505–9. DOI 10.2307/2220315.

Experience and Criteria, Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte 38, 1995, 261–75. JSTOR EXPERIENCE AND CRITERIA.

Bradley's Regress, The Copula and the Unity of the Proposition, Philosophical Quarterly 45, 1995, 161–80. DOI 10.2307/2220413.

Aeneas Ultor and the Problem of Pietas, Eirene 30, 1994, 70–96.

Truth, Meaning, and Literature, British Journal of Aesthetics 34, 1994, 392–9. DOI 10.1093/bjaesthetics/34.4.382

Molina on Divine Foreknowledge and the Principle of Bivalence, Journal of the History of Philosophy 32, 1994, 27–47. DOI 10.1353/hph.1994.0081.

Fatalism, Foreknowledge, and the Reality of the Future, The Modern Schoolman 71, 1994, 83–113. DOI 10.5840/schoolman199471211.

The Truth in Fiction, British Journal of Aesthetics 33, 1993, 177–9. DOI 10.1093/bjaesthetics/33.2.177.

Conditionals of Freedom and Middle Knowledge Philosophical Quarterly 43, 1993, 412–30. (Winner of 1992 PQ essay competition.) DOI 10.2307/2219983. Reprinted with corrections in E. Dekker et al. eds., Middle Knowledge (Peter Lang, 2000), 137–56, ISBN 978-3-631-36288-4.

Alexander’s Sea Battle: a discussion of Alexander of Aphrodisias De Fato 10, Phronesis 38, 1993, 75–94. DOI 10.1163/156852893321052460.

Turnus, Mezentius, and the Complexity of Virgil’s Aeneid, Latomus, Studies in Latin Literature and Roman History VI, 1992, 295–316, ISBN 978-2-870-31157-8.

Do Homeric Heroes make Real Decisions?, Classical Quarterly 40, 1990, 1–15. DOI 10.1017/S0009838800026768.

Platonism and Forms of Life, Auslegung 16, 1989, 1–16. DOI 10.17161/AJP.1808.9311.

Can Aesthetic Value Be Explained?, British Journal of Aesthetics 29, 1989, 329–40. DOI 10.1093/bjaesthetics/29.4.329.

Prizes and Awards

1987 Winner of Gaisford Prize for dissertation in classical literature (Oxford University). Title of essay: Tragedy and Subjectivity in Virgil’s Aeneid.

1988–9 Alexander von Humboldt Visiting Fellow, University of Mainz.

1992 Winner of Philosophical Quarterly prize for 1992. Title of competition: Scholasticism old and new. Title of essay: ‘Conditionals of Freedom and Middle Knowledge’.

1992, 1994 Visiting Fellow, Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh.

1994, 1996 In receipt of British Academy scholarship at the Fondation Hardt pour l’étude de l’antiquité classique (Geneva).

1995–6 Alexander von Humboldt Visiting Fellow, University of Bonn.

1998 DAAD Research Fellow at the Seminar für Logik und Grundlagen-forschung of the University of Bonn.

1999–2001 Head of Philosophy Department, University of Sussex.

2002–3 In receipt of funding under Research Leave Scheme of AHRB. Title of project: The Theory of Complexly Signifiables.

2007 Head of Philosophy Department, University of Liverpool.

2010–14 Member of AHRC college of assessors for grant applications.

2010–13 External examiner, Cambridge University, Part II of Philosophy Tripos.

2013–16 External examiner, Cambridge University, Part IA of Philosophy Tripos.

External links

Richard Gaskin at the University of Liverpool, Philosophy.

Richard Gaskin on Academia.edu

The Literary Voice