Josef Stern
William H. Colvin Professor in the Department of Philosophy, Committee on Jewish Studies, and the College; Director, Chicago Center for Jewish Studies; Associate Faculty
M.A., Ph.D. (Columbia University)
Josef Stern’s current research is principally in contemporary philosophy of language and medieval philosophy, especially the philosophy of Moses Maimonides. His broader interests and the courses he teaches include various topics in epistemology and metaphysics (such as skepticism and free will), Islamic and Latin medieval philosophy, philosophy of religion, Hume, logic, and philosophy of art. At present, he is completing a book entitled The Matter and Form of Maimonides’ “Guide of the Perplexed” and engaged in research on various topics in the theory of reference and on the semantics/pragmatics distinction, such as: demonstratives, contextualism, quotation, indirect discourse, and belief sentences; normativity in language and the foundations of linguistics; issues of representation in language and art; and the reception of Quine’s indeterminacy thesis as a case study of the transformation of a problem in twentieth-century Anglo-American philosophy. Among his recent publications are Metaphor in Context; Problems and Parables of Law: Maimonides and Nahmanides on Reasons for the Commandments; “Metaphor, Literal, Literalism”; “Maimonides’ Epistemology,” “The Knot That Never Was,” and “Meaning and Language in Medieval Jewish Philosophy.”
