Director of Graduate Admissions, Holds Secondary Appointment in Data Science
Thomas Hofweber specializes in metaphysics, the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mathematics, and the foundations of artificial intelligence.
He is the author of Idealism and the Harmony of Thought and Reality (Oxford University Press, 2023), which admittedly defends idealism, but it’s not as bad as that sounds. See this review for supporting evidence. His first book Ontology and the Ambitions of Metaphysics appeared with Oxford University Press in 2016. See OUP, amazon, a PPR book symposium, or an Analysis book symposium for more. A long time ago he co-edited, with Anthony Everett, the collection Empty Names, Fiction, and the Puzzles of Non-Existence CSLI Publications (2000).
He is also the Director of the AI Project and holds a secondary appointment in the School of Data Science and Society.
Sample article publications include: “Proof-theoretic reduction as a philosopher’s tool” Erkenntnis (2000) (selected for the Philosopher’s Annual in 2001) “A Puzzle about Ontology” Noûs (2005); “Inexpressible Properties and Propositions” Oxford Studies in Metaphysics (2005) (winner of the Oxford Studies Younger Metaphysician Prize, and the APA Article Prize); “Supervenience and Object-Dependent Properties” Journal of Philosophy (2005); “Number Determiners, Numbers, and Arithmetic” Philosophical Review (2005); “Innocent Statements and their Metaphysically Loaded Counterparts” Philosophers’ Imprint (2007) (selected for the Philosopher’s Annual in 2008); “Validity, Paradox, and the Ideal of Deductive Logic” in JC Beall (ed.) Revenge of the Liar (2008); “The Meta-Problem of Change” Noûs (2009); “Ambitious, Yet Modest, Metaphysics” in Metametaphysics, Chalmers, Manley, and Wasserman (eds.) (2009); “Formal tools and the philosophy of mathematics” New Waves in the Philosophy of Mathematics, Bueno and Linnebo (eds.) (2009); “How to endure” (with J. David Velleman) Philosophical Quarterly (2011). “Infinitesimal Chances” Philosophers’ Imprint (2014). “Cardinality arguments against regular probability measures” Thought (2014). “Hyperreal-valued probability measures approximating a real-valued measure” (with Ralf Schindler) in the Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic (2016). “Carnap’s Big Idea” in Ontology after Carnap, Blatti and LaPointe (eds.) OUP (2016), “The place of subjects in the metaphysics of material objects” dialectica (2015). “Fine’s fragmentalist interpretation of special relativity” (with Marc Lange) in Nous (2016). “Intellectual humility and the limits of conceptual representation” Res Philosophica (2016). “Are there ineffable aspects of reality?” in Oxford Studies in Metaphysics (2017). “Conceptual idealism without ontological idealism: why idealism is true after all” in Idealism: new essays in metaphysics, Goldschmidt and Pearce (eds.) OUP (2018). “Idealism and the Harmony of Thought and Reality” in Mind (2019), “The unrevisability of logic” Philosophical Perspectives (2021), “The case against higher-order metaphysics” Metaphysics (2022), “Inescapable concepts” Australasian Journal of Philosophy (2023), “Are language models rational? The case of coherence norms and belief revision”(with Peter Hase, Elias Stengel-Eskin, Mohit Bansal) arXiv preprint, “Fundamental Problems With Model Editing: How Should Rational Belief Revision Work in LLMs?” (with Peter Hase, Xiang Zhou, Elias Stengel-Eskin, Mohit Bansal). arXiv preprint.
For a more complete list of papers, see his homepage.