Objectivity and the Parochial

Charles Travis

Oct 2010 · OUP Oxford

About this ebook

Thought, to be thought at all, must be about a world independent of us. But thinking takes capacities for thought, which inevitably shape thought's objects. What would count as something being green is, somehow, fixed by what we, who have being green in mind, are prepared to recognize. So it can seem that what is true, and what is not, is not independent of us. So our thought cannot really be about an independent world. We are confronted with an apparent paradox. Much philosophy, from Locke to Kant to Frege to Wittgenstein, to Hilary Putnam and John McDowell today, is a reaction to this paradox. Charles Travis presents a set of eleven essays, each working in its own way towards dissolving this air of paradox. The key to his account of thought and world is the idea of the parochial: features of our thought which need not belong to all thought.

About the author

Charles Travis graduated in philosophy from University of California Berkeley in 1963. He received his doctorate from UCLA in 1967. In 1966 he began as an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina in 1967. Since then he has worked in 4 countries (plus several others as a visitor), and at quite a number of universities, most recently the University of Stirling, Northwestern University and King's College London. He has also visited at the University of Michigan and Harvard University, and lectured — on Wittgenstein — at the Collège de France. He is currently cooperating on projects in the University of Porto and the University of Santiago de Compostela.