Professor Vance specializes in aesthetics, the history of modern philosophy, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind. He is devoting particular attention to problems in contemporary philosophy of art. Sample publications: “On Being Earlier Than,” Noûs (1970); “Art Objects: Modernism vs. Literalism,” Dialogos (1988); “Fiction and the De Se Self,”Philosophical Papers (1994); “Sculpture,” The British Journal of Aesthetics (1995).