Harvey Lederman

firstname[dot]lastname[at]utexas[dot]edu

I am a professor of philosophy at UT Austin. Until 2022, I was an assistant professor, and then a professor of philosophy at Princeton. You can view my CV here.

I have broad interests in contemporary philosophy and in the history of philosophy, especially Chinese neo-Confucianism. A full list of my published and working papers can be found below.

In January 2024, together with Johan Gustafsson, I organized a conference on completeness and incompleteness of preference and value. The website for this event is here.

In March 2022, together with P. J. Ivanhoe and Snow Xueyin Zhang, I organized an international conference on Wang Yangming, Wang Yangming and Ming Thought. You can view photos from the event on the "Highlights" page. A report on the conference, which also tells the story of how I started working on Wang Yangming, was published in 国际儒学.

In 2018, 2019 and 2020, I organized the Princeton Talks in Epistemology and Metaphysics (TEAM) conference series. You can find the programs for these three conferences here.

Work in Progress:

• Maximal Social Welfare Relations on Infinite Populations Satisfying Permutation Invariance (with Jeremy Goodman).
• Share the Sugar (with Christian Tarsney and Dean Spears).
• What Forms for Incomplete Population Ethics Does Social Expected Multi-Utility Permit? (with Christian Tarsney and Dean Spears).
• Incompleteness, Independence, and Negative Dominance.

Unpublished Short Pieces:

• Two Letters on the Unity of Knowledge and Action by Wang Yangming.
• Response to Ivanhoe, "The Introspective, Perceptual, and Spontaneous Response Models of the Philosophy of Wang Yangming". The original paper by Ivanhoe can be found here.

Publications:

• Trying without fail (with Ben Holguín). Philosophical Studies (2024).
• Are Language Models More like Libraries or like Librariarians? Bibliotechnism, the Novel Reference Problem, and the Attitudes of LLMs (with Kyle Mahowald). Transactions of the Association of Computational Linguistics (TACL) (2024).
• Remarks on Method for Chinese Philosophy. Published in Chinese translation by Chi-keung Chan 陳志強, Newsletter of Chinese Literature and Philosophy 中國文哲研究通訊 (2024). (Earlier featured on Leiter Reports and Daily Nous.)
• Of marbles and matchsticks. Oxford Studies in Epistemology, forthcoming. Winner of the Marc Sanders Prize in Epistemology (2023).
• “一念发动处，便即是行了”——王阳明心理行为论简议. 哲学分析. 14 (2023) 80.4: 191-5. English version; Chinese preprint.
• Higher-order metaphysics and propositional attitudes. Higher-order Metaphysics ed. Peter Fritz and Nick Jones (2024).
• Conceptions of Genuine Knowledge in Wang Yangming. Oxford Studies in Epistemology, 7 (2023): 134-175.
• Fregeanism, sententialism, and scope. Linguistics and Philosophy, 45 (2022): 1235-1275.
• The Introspective Model of Genuine Knowledge in Wang Yangming. The Philosophical Review,131.2 (2022): 169-213.
• What is the "Unity" in the "Unity of Knowledge and Action"? Dao, 21 (2022): 569-603. (Winner, Dao Best Essay Award 2022.)
• Closed Structure (with Peter Fritz and Gabriel Uzquiano). Journal of Philosophical Logic, 50, (2021): 1249-1291.
• Fine-grained semantics for attitude reports. Semantics and Pragmatics, 2021. Preprint with appendices.
• Revisionist Reporting (with Kyle Blumberg). Philosophical Studies 178 (2021): 755-783. (29 pages)
• Perspectivism (with Jeremy Goodman). Noûs, 55.3 (2021): 623-648 (26 pages). Preprint with footnotes instead of endnotes.
• Classical Opacity (with Michael Caie and Jeremy Goodman). Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 101.3 (2020): 524-566. (43 pages)
• Sense, Reference and Substitution (with Jeremy Goodman). Philosophical Studies 177 (2020): 947-952. (6 pages)
• Uncommon Knowledge. Mind 127.508 (2018): 1069-1105. (37 pages)
• Two Paradoxes of Common Knowledge. Noûs 52.4 (2018): 921-945. (25 pages)
• Can Modalities Save Naive Set Theory? (with Peter Fritz, Tiankai Liu, and Dana Scott). The Review of Symbolic Logic 11.1 (2018): 21-47. (27 pages)
• Extended Preferences and Interpersonal Well-Being Comparisons (with Hilary Greaves). Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 96.3 (2018): 636-667 (32 pages)
• Aggregating Extended Preferences (with Hilary Greaves). Philosophical Studies 174.5 (2017): 1163-1190. (27 pages)
• Prospects for a Naive Theory of Classes (with Hartry Field and Tore Fjetland Øgaard). Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 58.4 (2017): 461-506. (46 pages)
• People with Common Priors Can Agree to Disagree. The Review of Symbolic Logic 8.1 (2015) 11-45. (35 pages)
• ho pote on esti and Coupled Entities: A Form of Explanation in Aristotle's Natural Philosophy. Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 46 (Summer 2014) 109-164. (56 pages)

Conference Proceedings:

• Standard State Space Models of Unawareness (with Peter Fritz). Proceedings of TARK XV: Fifteenth Conference on Theoretical Aspects of Rationality and Knowledge, Pittsburgh, June 4-6, 2015.

Handbook Article:

• Common Knowledge. In Marija Jankovic and Kirk Ludwig eds. Handbook of Collective Intentionality. Routledge. 2018. Pages 181-195.

Dissertation Chapters, not currently in progress:

• A theory of common ground. (Chapter 2 of my 2014 Oxford DPhil (PhD) thesis. The rest of the thesis (with the exception of Chapter 5, below) has been superseded by published papers. Someday I would like to return to these ideas, but I have no active plans to do so.)
• Agreement and equilibrium with minimal introspection. (Chapter 5 of my 2014 Oxford DPhil (PhD) thesis. The chapter contains one small observation that I believe was new at the time, but I do not expect to work further on this topic.)

Older Papers:

• H. Lederman, J. Macdonald, D. Stefanovic, and M. N. Stojanovic, Deoxyribozyme-Based Three-Input Logic Gates and Construction of a Molecular Full Adder. Biochemistry, 45, 4 (2006) 1194 - 1199.
• J. Macdonald, Y. Li, M. Sutovic, H. Lederman, K. Pendri, W. Lu, B. L. Andrews, D Stefanovic and M. N. Stojanovic. Medium Scale Integration of Molecular Logic Gates in an Automaton. Nano Letters (Letter); 6, 11 (2006) 2598-2603.