Introduction
I studied philosophy at LMU Munich before moving to Oxford to complete the BPhil in Philosophy at New College, Oxford. I then went on to do my PhD in Philosophy at New York University. Prior to taking up my current post at Queen’s I was the Stalnaker Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT.
Teaching
I teach philosophy to undergraduates in all years at Queen’s. I teach the General Philosophy, Introduction to Logic, and Moral Philosophy first-year papers. Moreover, I give tutorials throughout theoretical philosophy, ethics, history of philosophy, and history of logic.
Research
My main research interests lie at the intersection of metaphysics and logic. I am especially interested in general questions about the structure of reality and the nature of necessity and possibility. My work employs tools from higher-order logic to frame and investigate such questions. Higher-order logic is a formal framework with particularly rich expressive resources, making it ideally suited for precisely articulating highly general questions about the structure of reality and the nature of modality, properties, relations, and states of affairs. I have another ongoing research project in the history of logic in which I explore the algebraic tradition of logic in the 19th century, and I have additional research interests in epistemology and the philosophy of language.
Publications
‘Fine on the Possibility of Vagueness’. To appear in Outstanding Contributions to
Logic: Kit Fine, ed. by F.L.G Faroldi and F. Van de Putte, Springer.
‘Essence and Necessity’. Journal of Philosophical Logic, 51 (3): 653-690. 2022.
‘The Reduction of Necessity to Essence’. Mind, 129 (514): 351-380. 2020.
‘Why Intellectualism Still Fails’. The Philosophical Quarterly, 66: 500-515. 2016.
For a complete list of my publications, please visit www.andreasditter.com