Academic Philosophy
Published Or Forthcoming Papers
- 2023. Ideology and Intersectionality, in Anderson and Lepore, Oxford Handbook of Applied Philosophy of Language. [penultimate]
- 2022. 'In Defence of Ordinary Language Philosophy', with Herman Cappelen, Metaphilosophy (special issue on new topics in metaphilosophy) [penultimate]
- 2021. 'Social and Political Aspects of Generic Language and Speech', with Rachel Sterken, in Khoo & Sterken eds, The Routledge Handbook of Social and Political Philosophy of Language.[penultimate]
- 2021. 'Positing Covert Variables and The Quantifier Theory of Tense', forthcoming in special edition of Inquiry guest edited by Max Kölbel and David Rey, based on this workshop [penultimate draft]
- 2019. 'Quotation', with Herman Cappelen and Ernest Lepore, Stanford Encyclopedia Of Philosophy (I was responsible for updating C&L's original and wrote the part on mixed quotation).
- 2019. 'The Problem Of Peer Review Is The Most Important Philosophical Problem', Metaphilosophy [blog version] [published version]
- 2018. 'Predicates, Parts, and Impermanence: A Contemporary Version of Some Core Buddhist Tenets', forthcoming in Religious Studies [penultimate draft] [final version]
- 2017. 'A Semantic Problem For Stage Theory', Ergo [almost final draft] [final open access version]
Reviews
1. Review of Eli Hirsch's Radical Skepticism and The Shadow Of Doubt, for Philosophy in Review [draft] [final version]
2. Review of Robert Brandom's A Spirit of trust, for Marx and Philosophy Review of Books [final version]
3. Review of Misak's Ramsey bio in The Philosopher, also available freely online here.
Drafts
1. Paper on formal semantics, conceptual engineering, and Twitter [draft] [oddly popular blog version]
2. Paper on referring to masses
3. Paper on quotation [draft]
4. Paper on predicativism [draft].
PhD
1. Against Type E*, PhD Thesis [download here]
* There are a lot of typos and bad formatting in this, partly owing to last minute technological bad luck, partly owing to other reasons. Please disregard them. Also, mortifyingly, I neglected to thank a couple of people in the acknowledgements. I am very sorry about that.
Other Stuff
1. Coming From Nothing. philosophical novella [zero books page] [amazon page][decent-sized extract (read this first)][Irish times article][article explaining how and why I wrote the book] [letter of solidarity with library genesis and sci-hub which sure seems out of place here]
2. Nineties to Now, McFarland Books. Study of 90s US pop culture. Vaguely related blog about one of the book's arguments.
3. Russian stuff: on '60s nihilism, contemporary philosophy of language, other stuff; on Bahktin's notion of double-voicedness in Dostoyevsky; on Dostoyesky's Gambler and Gamestop; on a Russian version of philpapers' survey; non-classical logic and other things in early 20th c Russia. In a very different vein: after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine I started trying to look at pro-war propaganda sometimes using various computational methods, in the hope both of understanding propaganda--as a philosopher--and the war--as a person. I reckon the following are moderately worth reading: https://medium.com/p/a5f78e3c3542, using word embeddings to understand the meaning of propaganda; https://medium.com/p/674482ec1f7e on how we'd expect an authoritarian regime to deal with social media; https://medium.com/p/5bbe08587af5 on electronic voting in Russia which should concern anybody; https://medium.com/p/5f02c704c3a9 some important history reflected in summer rhetoric; https://medium.com/p/91809b35f35f on anti-LGBTQ rhetoric; an illustration of my theory of propaganda as an often subtle phenomenon (Foucaultian, one might say) https://medium.com/p/dead426cde14; https://medium.com/p/81577641428e and a preliminary and somewhat naive look at whether counting words could help say 'what the war is actually about' which as my scare quotes indicate I don't think is super useful.
4. Bitcoin\crypto stuff: the first in a hopefully big series that explains to neutrally explain how Bitcoin works from the bottom up, along the way considering its merits; basically just reportage of how the 2021 Russian elections happened on a blockchain; a parable explaining proof-of-work blockchains
4. https://medium.com/@mittmattmutt is my blog, which in its 5 years has received 100k views, and 20k reads (which medium estimates presumably by scrolling and time). This means that people have spent around 6 months 24/7 reading it. I think this about how to fix peer review is one of my few genuinely good ideas. This is a sort of essayistic (I mean that pejoratively) discussion of syntactic theory and machine learning that despite the parenthesis I like. This very weird essay is in philo-fiction (cf science fiction), trying to work out the philosophy that applies to a fictional world, that of Flatland. And this sketches how to do history of philosophy without paying attention to philosophy. Note: my endorsing something on my blog ≠ my endorsing it.
5. Peer review stuff: decentralized peer review take 1, take 2, take 3. Massively centralized peer review; trying to match reviewers with papers better with derivative products (i.e. not papers and not reviews)
6. 'There is Only One God and His Name is Death', about the aesthetics of killing in Game of Thrones, in Ultimate Game Of Thrones And Philosophy [penultimate draft NOTE: MASSIVE spoilers from the first paragraph]
6. 'Westworld As Prediction', to appear in Ultimate Westworld and Philosophy [penultimate draft]
7. 'The Beauty Of Analytic Philosophy', forthcoming in Think, argues that analytic philosophy has underappreciated aesthetic merits. [draft]
8. 'Why We Should Care About Philosophy', on RTE'S Brainstorm, brief introduction to philosophy for a general audience
9. A short story about machine learning and personal identity
2. Nineties to Now, McFarland Books. Study of 90s US pop culture. Vaguely related blog about one of the book's arguments.
3. Russian stuff: on '60s nihilism, contemporary philosophy of language, other stuff; on Bahktin's notion of double-voicedness in Dostoyevsky; on Dostoyesky's Gambler and Gamestop; on a Russian version of philpapers' survey; non-classical logic and other things in early 20th c Russia. In a very different vein: after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine I started trying to look at pro-war propaganda sometimes using various computational methods, in the hope both of understanding propaganda--as a philosopher--and the war--as a person. I reckon the following are moderately worth reading: https://medium.com/p/a5f78e3c3542, using word embeddings to understand the meaning of propaganda; https://medium.com/p/674482ec1f7e on how we'd expect an authoritarian regime to deal with social media; https://medium.com/p/5bbe08587af5 on electronic voting in Russia which should concern anybody; https://medium.com/p/5f02c704c3a9 some important history reflected in summer rhetoric; https://medium.com/p/91809b35f35f on anti-LGBTQ rhetoric; an illustration of my theory of propaganda as an often subtle phenomenon (Foucaultian, one might say) https://medium.com/p/dead426cde14; https://medium.com/p/81577641428e and a preliminary and somewhat naive look at whether counting words could help say 'what the war is actually about' which as my scare quotes indicate I don't think is super useful.
4. Bitcoin\crypto stuff: the first in a hopefully big series that explains to neutrally explain how Bitcoin works from the bottom up, along the way considering its merits; basically just reportage of how the 2021 Russian elections happened on a blockchain; a parable explaining proof-of-work blockchains
4. https://medium.com/@mittmattmutt is my blog, which in its 5 years has received 100k views, and 20k reads (which medium estimates presumably by scrolling and time). This means that people have spent around 6 months 24/7 reading it. I think this about how to fix peer review is one of my few genuinely good ideas. This is a sort of essayistic (I mean that pejoratively) discussion of syntactic theory and machine learning that despite the parenthesis I like. This very weird essay is in philo-fiction (cf science fiction), trying to work out the philosophy that applies to a fictional world, that of Flatland. And this sketches how to do history of philosophy without paying attention to philosophy. Note: my endorsing something on my blog ≠ my endorsing it.
5. Peer review stuff: decentralized peer review take 1, take 2, take 3. Massively centralized peer review; trying to match reviewers with papers better with derivative products (i.e. not papers and not reviews)
6. 'There is Only One God and His Name is Death', about the aesthetics of killing in Game of Thrones, in Ultimate Game Of Thrones And Philosophy [penultimate draft NOTE: MASSIVE spoilers from the first paragraph]
6. 'Westworld As Prediction', to appear in Ultimate Westworld and Philosophy [penultimate draft]
7. 'The Beauty Of Analytic Philosophy', forthcoming in Think, argues that analytic philosophy has underappreciated aesthetic merits. [draft]
8. 'Why We Should Care About Philosophy', on RTE'S Brainstorm, brief introduction to philosophy for a general audience
9. A short story about machine learning and personal identity
Coding
(Most of these don't work to varying degrees, but could be made to work without much hassle)
- indexmaker, a pandemic month project aiming at making it easier to make indexes for academic books (python & js/html). If you want to use this, get in touch, so I can tell you about problems/bugs/shortcomings.
- An android app, for learning philosophy, in the form of an annotated version of Russell's Problems Of Philosophy, notes, and a 'final exam' (React Native), also a web version that is basically the same
- A library for automating the process of finding academic reviews (Google Apps Script),