Terence Parsons Explained

Region:Western philosophy
Era:Contemporary philosophy
Terence Parsons
Birth Name:Terence Dwight Parsons
Birth Date:1939
Death Date:2022
Education:Stanford University (Ph.D., 1966)
School Tradition:Analytic philosophy
Main Interests:Metaphysics
Notable Ideas:Nonexistent objects
Dual property strategy
Thesis Title:The Elimination of Individual Concepts
Thesis Year:1966
Doctoral Advisor:Jaakko Hintikka
Doctoral Students:Edward N. Zalta
Jim Waldo

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.

Life and career

Parsons 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

Parsons 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

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External links

Notes and References

  1. https://www.apaonline.org/news/612790/In-Memoriam-Terence-Parsons.htm In Memoriam: Terence Parsons
  2. Book: Articulating Medieval Logic: Author Information. Oxford University Press. 4 March 2018. 10 May 2014. 978-0-19-968884-5 .
  3. Web site: Wolpert. Stuart. Six UCLA faculty elected to academy. UCLA Newsroom. 4 March 2018. en. 8 May 2017.
  4. Web site: Laurels to Linguists Archive. Linguistic Society of America. 4 March 2018. en.