Joshua Dever

Joshua Dever is currently in his first semester on the faculty of the Department of Philosophy. He arrived from the University of California at Berkeley, where he won many academic honors as a doctoral student. Among these were the designation of “Outstanding Teaching Assistant” in 1996 and the acceptance of a National Science Foundation fellowship between 1991 and 1994. He also graduated magna cum laude as an undergraduate at Princeton University.

“Joshua came very highly recommended to the University,” said philosophy chair Anthony Ungar. “He is on the cutting edge of research in philosophical semantics. One of the reasons we were so anxious to get someone specializing in the field was because there is a strong interest in it both among our own graduate students and among philosophers generally.”

Dever is currently completing his doctoral dissertation in the area of philosophy of language. Speaking in broad terms, Dever said of his work, “What I’m interested in is the nature of truth and meaning and how language and thought are hooked up with things and events in the world.” More technically, his dissertation and published articles seek to articulate, among other things, “a unified account of the semantic properties through which noun phrases forge connections between language and the world.”

Dever is teaching Introductory Logic this semester and a graduate seminar on the philosophy of language. He said he is also “spending time helping prepare graduate students going on the job market.” This is the first year that the University will be sending graduate students in philosophy onto the job market since the Ph.D. program in philosophy was reinstated in 1992.

“Our department was recently ranked for the first time by Brian Lieter at the University of Texas at Austin,” Dever said, “a ranking taken very seriously by people in the field.”

Department chair Ungar said the ranking, which is called “The Philosophical Gourmet,” and which is posted on the website of the academic publisher Basil Blackwell, “has complimented us on our outstanding junior appointments — clearly with Josh, among others, in mind.”

John LeMay