DSC_0259Mitchell S. Green
Department of Philosophy, 104 Cocke Hall, University of Virginia
P.O. Box 400780, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4780.
(434) 924-6922; msg6m at virginia dot edu

 

 

I am the NEH/Horace Goldsmith Distinguished Teaching Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Virginia.  I have held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, The Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, The Mead Endowment, The University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Philosophy of Science, the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, the American Council of Learned Societies, the University of Virginia’s Teaching Resource Center, and the University of Virginia’s Shannon Center for Advanced Studies. 

 

My specializations are in Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Mind, and Aesthetics. I am also interested in Metaphysics, Decision Theory, the Theory of Action, and the history of analytic philosophy. I have advised dissertations on the Philosophy of Language and Aesthetics, and, master's theses in the Philosophy of Law, Epistemology, Aesthetics, Philosophy of Mind, and Philosophy of Language. I regularly teach courses of interest to students in Cognitive Science and in Linguistics, and I sit on U.Va.'s Linguistics Committee.  I have supervised various Undergraduate Honors/Distinguished Majors Theses, Master's Theses, and Dissertations.   I am faculty advisor to the Jefferson Literary and Debating Society.

 

Click here for my curriculum vitae.

 

 

My current research interests include the evolutionary biology of communication, speech acts and their role in conversation, empathy, self-knowledge, self-expression, and attitude ascription. 

 

Projects:

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For 2009-2012 I am a Co-PI (with Dorit Bar-On, UNC) on Grant #0925975 from the National Science Foundation in support of the project: Expression, Communication and the Origins of Meaning.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I am a co-organizer (with Brady Clark) of the Northwestern University Language Evolution Workshop, to be held September 10, 2010, Northwestern University.

 

For 2009-12 I am directing the High-Phi Project, which explores incorporating philosophical pedagogy into Virginia high schools. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I am a panelist on AskPhilosophers.org, where anyone can post questions for a panel of about thirty professional philosophers on any topic in philosophy. 

 

 

Books:

 

 

 

Self-Expression, Oxford University Press (U.K.), 2007.  Also available on Oxford Scholarship Online.  Reviews may be found in the British Journal of Aesthetics, the Philosophical Quarterly, Metapsychology, and Mind.

 

 

Moore's Paradox: New Essays on Belief, Rationality and the First Person, edited by myself and John Williams, Oxford University Press (U.K.), 2007.  A review in Notre Dame Phil. Reviews may be found here.

 

 

Engaging Philosophy: A Brief Introduction (2006, Hackett Publishing).  Also available as an e-book at e-books.com.

 

Articles:

Perceiving Emotions,’ forthcoming in the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, vol. 89 (2010), pp. 45-61.

‘Précis of Self-Expression,’ and ‘Replies to Eriksson, Martin and Moore,’ both in a special issue of Acta Analytica (vol. 25) containing a symposium on Self-Expression, 2010.

‘Language Understanding and Knowledge of Meaning,’ forthcoming in The Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication, Volume V.

‘Lionspeak: Expression, Meaning and Communication,’ with Dorit Bar-On, forthcoming in E. Rubenstein (ed.) Self, Language and World (Ridgeview).

 

 

‘Showing and Meaning: How We Make Our Ideas Clear,’ to appear in Meaning and Analysis: Themes from H.P. Grice, edited by Klaus Petrus (Palgrave MacMillan, 2010).

‘Moore’s Paradox, Truth and Accuracy: A Reply to Lawlor and Perry’ (with J. Williams) to appear in Acta Analytica.

 

 

“How and What Can We Learn from Literature?” in Hagberg and Jost (eds.) The Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of Literature.

"Speech Acts, the Handicap Principle and the Expression of Psychological States," Mind and Language, vol. 24 (April, 2009): 139-63.

 

"Empathy, Expression, and What Artworks Have to Teach," in G. Hagberg (ed.) Art and Ethical Criticism (Blackwell, 2008): 95-122.

"Expression, Indication and Showing What’s Within," Philosophical Studies 137 (2008): 389-98.

 

How Do Speech Acts Express Psychological States?,” in Tsohatzidis (ed.) John Searle's Philosophy of Language:

Force, Meaning and Mind (Cambridge, 2007): 267-84.

 

 

"Direct Reference, Empty Names, and Implicature," Canadian Journal of Philosophy 37 (2007): 419-37.

 

Speech Acts,” in the Stanford Online Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2007).

 

"Moorean Absurdity and Showing What's Within," in Moore's Paradox (2007): 189-214.  

 

"Introduction," with John Williams, in Moore's Paradox (2007): 3-35.

 

"You Don’t See With Your Eyes, You Perceive With Your Mind," in D. Darby and T. Shelby (eds.) Hip Hop and Philosophy, with a preface by Cornel West (Open Court, 2005): 27-37.

"Intention and Authenticity in Facial Expressions of Pain", in Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24 (2003): 460-1. (Click here for the full text of the BBS symposium in which this is a peer commentary.)

 

"Grice's Frown: On Meaning and Expression", in G. Meggle and C. Plunze (eds.) Saying, Meaning, Implicating (University of Leipzig Press, 2003): 100-119.

"The Inferential Significance of Frege's Assertion Sign," Facta Philosophica Vol. 4, No. 2 (2002): 201-229.

 

"The Status of Supposition," Nous Vol. 34 (2000): 376-399.

 

"Illocutionary Force and Semantic Content," Linguistics and Philosophy Vol. 23 (2000): 435-473.

 

"Attitude Ascription's Affinity to Measurement", International Journal of Philosophical Studies, vol. 7 (1999), pp. 323-348.

 

"Moore's Many Paradoxes," Philosophical Papers Vol. 28 (1999): 97-109.

 

"On the Autonomy of Linguistic Meaning," Mind Vol. 106 (April, 1997), pp. 217-244.

 

"Direct Reference and Implicature," Philosophical Studies Vol. 91 (July, 1998), pp. 61-90.

 

"Illocutions, Implicata, and What a Conversation Requires," Pragmatics and Cognition Vol. 7 (1999), pp. 65-91.

 

"Symmetry Arguments for Cooperation in the Prisoners' Dilemma" (with C. Bicchieri) in Contemporary Action Theory: The Philosophy and Logic of Social Action (Kluwer, 1997, pp. 229-49). Reprinted in R. Jeffrey, B. Skyrms, and C. Bicchieri (eds.) The Logic of Strategy (Oxford, 1999).

"Indeterminism and the Thin Red Line," (with N. Belnap) in Philosophical Perspectives 8: Logic and Language (1994), pp. 365-388. Reprinted in Facing the Future (Oxford University Press, 2001).

 

"Quantity, Volubility, and Some Varieties of Discourse," Linguistics and Philosophy, vol. 18 (1995), pp. 83-112.

 

"Reflections on Reflection: Van Fraassen on Belief," (with C. Hitchcock) Synthese, vol. 98 (1994), pp. 297-324.

 

 

Book Reviews:

Review of G. Currie, Narratives and Narrators: A Philosophy of Stories (OUP, 2010), co-authored with Corin Fox, and forthcoming in Analysis Reviews (2011).

Review of N. Zangwill, Aesthetic Creation (Oxford, 2007), Analysis Reviews, vol. 69 (2009): 399-401.

Review of W. Davis, Implicature: Intention, Convention, and Principle in the Failure of Gricean Theory (Cambridge, 1998), Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. 65 (2002): 241-4.

 

Review of Michael Beaney, Frege Making Sense (Duckworth, 1996), Mind, vol. 108 (1999): 567-70.

 

Review of Michael Dummett, Origins of Analytic Philosophy (Harvard, 1994), The Philosophical Review, vol. 104 (1995), pp. 613-615.

 

 

Encyclopedia Entries and Bibliographies:

‘An Annotated Bibliography of Pragmatics’, forthcoming in Oxford Bibliographies Online, 2010.

‘Speech Acts,’ in O’Connor (ed.) A Companion to the Philosophy of Action (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).

 

‘Saul Kripke,’ in E. Lepore (ed.) The Thoemmes Dictionary of Modern American Philosophers (2005).

 

‘Assertion,’ in the Elsevier Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2nd Ed. (2005).

‘Imperative Logic’ , in E. Craig (ed.) The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1997).

 

‘Truthtelling’ , in E. Freeman and P. Werhane (eds.) The Blackwell Encyclopedic Dictionary of Business Ethics, 2nd Ed. (1997).

 

Some Recent Talks:

•’Perceiving Emotions,’ Department of Philosophy, Florida State University, April 2, 2010, and at the Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society, University College Dublin, July 2010.

•’Wags, Bows and Communicative Stability,’ a presentation at the Workshop on Dogs, Humans and Other Animals, Berkeley, June, 2010. 

•Facilitator and Lead Speaker, “Philosophy Fridays”, a series of discussions—all free and open to the public--about philosophy, to be held on the second Friday of March, April, May           and June, organized and sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution, and held at the Ripley Center, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C.

•‘Knowledge-That Reduces to Knowledge-How!,’ Society for Exact Philosophy, Kansas City, MO, March, 2010.

•’Depicting and Speaker-Meaning,’ at the Workshop on Pictorial Representation and Meaning, National University of Singapore, January 15-6, 2010.

•’Comments on Vranas and Imperative Inference,’ American Philosophical Association Central Division, February, 2010.

•A commentator (responding to Liz Camp and Mark Richard) at a symposium on ‘Affective Language and Truth-Conditional Semantics,’ Eastern APA, New York, December, 2009.

•’Norms of Assertion: A Perspective from Evolutionary Game Theory,’ a presentation to the Workshop on Assertion and Sincerity, Sheffield University, December, 2009.

•’Evolutionary Game Theory Meets the Evolution of Language,’ Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, December, 2009.

•’The Evolution of Language: Some Constraints On a Theory,’ Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, October 27, 2009.

•’Evolutionary Biology and the Philosophy of Language,’ Washington University in St. Louis, September 17, 2009.

•’Language Understanding and Knowledge of Meaning,’ University of Missouri in St. Louis, September 18, 2009; and as a plenary lecture at the Meaning, Understanding and Knowledge Conference, Riga, Latvia, August, 2009.

•‘Philosophical Dimensions of the Evolution of Language,’ Sofia University, June 1-5.

‘Replies to Bar-On and Martin,’ part of an Author Meets Critics session for Self-Expression, with comments from Dorit Bar-On (UNC), and Michael Martin (Berkeley/UCL), APA Central Division, Chicago, February, 2009.

‘Rand, Art and Metaphysical Mirroring,’ invited presentation to the Objectivist Discussion Group, APA Eastern Division, Philadelphia, December 28, 2008.

Expressive Communication,invited presentation, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, September 12, 2008.

Semantic Compositionality As an Empirical Hypothesis,’ Lima/Virginia Philosophical Encounter, Tarma, Peru, August, 2008.

Learning from Fiction,invited presentation, Peruvian Society for Analytic Philosophy, Lima, August 18, 2008.

• ‘Brute Force: The Strategic Origins of Meaning and Speech Acts’, invited presentation, Arizona State University, October 3, 2008.

---invited presentation, Varna International Philosophical Conference, Varna, Bulgaria, June 2, 2008.

---invited presentation, Northwestern University Phil/Linguistics Working Group, December 7, 2007.

Imperatives, Implicature, and Rosss Paradox,”’ American Philosophical Association, Pacific Division, March, 2008.

Illocutionary Norms,invited presentation, 10th International Pragmatics Conference, Goteborg, Sweden, July 12, 2007.

Stainton, Speech Acts, and Acts of Speech,invited presentation, Canadian Philosophical Association, Saskatoon, Canada, May 28, 2007.

Privileged Access, Neo-expressivism, and Qualia,invited presentation, Georgetown University, May 11, 2007.

• ‘Animal and Human Communication: Bridging the Gap,’

—invited presentation, Singapore Management University, January 5, 2007,

—invited presentation, National University of Singapore, January 16, 2007.    

—invited presentation, Reunions Seminars, University of Virginia, June 2, 2007.

• ‘Rationality and the Unconscious’, invited presentation, Singapore Management University, January 12, 2007.

• ‘How Speech Acts Express Psychological States’

—competitive submission, Gesellschaft für Analytische Philosophie, VI, Berlin, September 13, 2006.

—invited presentation, Department of Philosophy, Western Michigan University, October 19, 2006.

—invited presentation, Virginia Philosophical Association, Richmond, VA, October 27, 2006.

—invited presentation, Department of Philosophy, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, November 3, 2006.

—invited presentation, Department of Philosophy, Northwestern University, November 17, 2006.

—invited presentation, Department of Philosophy, Virginia Tech, December 1, 2006.

—invited presentation, Singapore Management University, January 19, 2007.

 

Some Upcoming Talks/Lectures/Workshops:

•Director, NEH Summer Seminar on Philosophy for High School Teachers, University of Virginia, July, 2011.

•The Evolution of Language Workshop, Northwestern University, September 10, 2010, co-organized with Brady Clark (Linguistics, Northwestern).

•’Perceiving Emotions,’ Department of Philosophy, Georgia State University, October 1, 2010.

•The Hi-Phi (High School Philosophy) Workshop, fall 2010, co-organized with Bryan Cwik.

 

 

Distractions: