Terence Dwight Parsons (1939–2022)[1] was an American philosopher, specializing in philosophy of language and metaphysics. He was emeritus professor of philosophy at UCLA.
Terence Parsons | |
|---|---|
| Born | Terence Dwight Parsons 1939 |
| Died | 2022 |
| Education | Stanford University (Ph.D., 1966) |
| Era | Contemporary philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | Analytic philosophy |
| Thesis | The Elimination of Individual Concepts (1966) |
| Doctoral advisor | Jaakko Hintikka |
| Doctoral students | Edward N. Zalta Jim Waldo |
Main interests | Metaphysics |
Notable ideas | Nonexistent objects Dual property strategy |
Life and career
editParsons was born in Endicott, New York and graduated from the University of Rochester with a BA in physics. He received his PhD from Stanford University in 1966. He was a full-time faculty member at the University of Illinois at Chicago from 1965 to 1972, at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst from 1972 to 1979, at the University of California at Irvine from 1979 to 2000, and at the University of California at Los Angeles from 2000 to 2012.[2] In 2007, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.[3]
Philosophical work
editParsons worked on the semantics of natural language to develop theories of truth and meaning for natural language similar to those devised for artificial languages by philosophical logicians.[4] Heavily influenced by Alexius Meinong, he wrote Nonexistent Objects (1980), which dealt with possible world theory in order to defend the reality of nonexistent objects.
Works
edit- Nonexistent Objects, Yale University Press, 1980.
- Events in the Semantics of English, MIT Press, 1990.
- Indeterminate Identity, Oxford University Press, 2000.
- Articulating Medieval Logic, Oxford University Press, 2014.
See also
edit
References
edit- ^ In Memoriam: Terence Parsons
- ^ Articulating Medieval Logic: Author Information. Oxford University Press. 10 May 2014. ISBN 978-0-19-968884-5. Retrieved 4 March 2018.
- ^ Wolpert, Stuart (8 May 2017). "Six UCLA faculty elected to academy". UCLA Newsroom. Retrieved 4 March 2018.
- ^ "Laurels to Linguists Archive". Linguistic Society of America. Retrieved 4 March 2018.