Philosophy Department 100th Anniversary
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Philosophy Department 100th Anniversary

David Wells Agler

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David Wells Agler

David Wells Agler

Associate Teaching Professor of Philosophy and TLT Coordinator
229 Sparks Building
dwa132@psu.edu

Websites

http://www.davidagler.com/

Education

B.A. in Philosophy & English, IUPUI (Indianapolis, IN), 2004
M.A. in American Philosophy, IUPUI (Indianapolis, IN), 2010
Ph.D. in Philosophy, Penn State (University Park, PA), 2012

Professional Bio

Areas of Specialization

  • Classical American Philosophy (esp. Charles S. Peirce)
  • Philosophy of Language

Recent Courses

  • Bioethics (1st Year Seminar)
  • Basic Problems in Philosophy
  • Introduction to Theories of Knowledge
  • Critical Thinking
  • Symbolic Logic

Recent Publications

  • [2015, in press] w/ Ryan Pollock. Hume and Peirce on the Ultimate Stability of Belief. The Pacific Philosophical Quarterly.
  • 2014. Emergence from Within and Without: Juarrero on Polanyi’s Account of the External Origin of Emergence. Tradition and Discovery: The Polanyi Society Periodical 40(3):23–35
  • 2013. Symbolic Logic: Syntax, Semantics, Proof. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781442217430
  • 2013. w/ Deniz Durmuş. Christine Ladd-Franklin: Pragmatist Feminist . Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society: A Quarterly Journal in American Philosophy 49(3):299–321
  • 2013. What Engineers Can Do But Physicists Can’t: Polanyi and Margitay on Machines. Tradition and Discovery: The Polanyi Society Periodical 39(2):22–26.
  • 2013. Peirce and the Specification of Borderline Vagueness. Semiotica 193:195–215.
  • 2012. Polanyi and Peirce on the Critical Method (2012). Tradition and Discovery: The Polanyi Society Periodical 38(3):13–30.
  • 2011. Peirce’s Direct, Non-Reductive Contextual Theory of Names. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society: A Quarterly Journal in American Philosophy 46(4):611–640.
  • 2010. The UFAIL Approach: Unconventional Weapons and their ‘Unintended’ Medical Effects (2010). Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society 30(2):103–112.

Current Projects

I am working on (i) an essay detailing Peirce’s critique of Cartesian intuitionism and the method of doubt, (ii) an essay on Peirce’s correspondence with W. T. Harris and the decision to write three essays in 1868-1869 where he attempts to prove the laws of logic, and (iii) two co-written essays, one w/ Ryan Pollock on Hume and Peirce on the Fixation of Belief and one with several authors on Peirce’s “Critical Common Sensism”.

Research Interests

  • Analytic Philosophy
  • American Philosophy
  • Metaphysics
  • Modern Philosophy
  • Philosophy of Language

 

David Wells Agler
David Wells Agler