Sydney S. Shoemaker | |
|---|---|
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| Born | September 29, 1931 Boise, Idaho, U.S. |
| Died | September 3, 2022(2022-09-03) (aged 90) |
| Education | |
| Education | Reed College Cornell University (Ph.D., 1958) |
| Doctoral advisor | Norman Malcolm[1] |
| Philosophical work | |
| Era | 20th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | Analytic philosophy Representationalism |
| Institutions | Cornell University |
| Main interests | Philosophy of mind,metaphysics |
| Notable ideas | Immunity to error through misidentification Quasi-memory |
Sydney Sharpless Shoemaker (September 29, 1931 – September 3, 2022) was an Americanphilosopher. He was the Susan Linn Sage Professor ofPhilosophy atCornell University and is well known for his contributions tophilosophy of mind andmetaphysics.
Shoemaker graduated with aBachelor of Arts fromReed College and earned hisDoctor of Philosophy fromCornell University in 1958[2] under the supervision ofNorman Malcolm.[3] He taught philosophy atOhio State University from 1957 to 1960 then, in 1961, returned to Cornell as a faculty member of the philosophy department. In 1978 he was appointed the Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy, a position he held until his retirement, as professor emeritus of Philosophy.[4]
Among his students at Cornell wereRichard Moran[5] andSusanna Siegel.[6]
In 1971, he delivered theJohn Locke Lectures atOxford University.
Shoemaker died on September 3, 2022, at the age of 90. He was buried inGreensprings Natural Cemetery Preserve in Newfield.[7]
Shoemaker worked primarily in thephilosophy of mind andmetaphysics, and published many classic papers in both of these areas (as well as their overlap). In "Functionalism and Qualia" (1975), for example, he argued thatfunctionalism about mental states can account for the qualitative character (or 'raw feel') of mental states. In "Self-Reference and Self-Awareness" (1968), he argued that the phenomenon of absolute 'immunity to error through misidentification' is what distinguishes self-attributions of mental states (such as "I see a canary") from self-attributions of physical states (such as "I weigh 200 pounds").
In metaphysics, he defended the view that laws are metaphysically necessary, a position that follows from his view of properties as clusters of conditionalcausal powers. He also applied his view of properties to theproblem of mental causation. He also distinguished contributions to the literature onself-knowledge andpersonal identity, where he defended aLockean psychologicalcontinuity theory in his influential paper "Persons and their Pasts".[8] In his later work on the content ofperception he has argued for a distinctive version ofrepresentationalism.[9]
Sydney Shoemaker and Carl Ginet have been working in metaphysics and epistemology at Cornell since the late 1960s and early 1970s. Both did their graduate work at Cornell – Shoemaker with Norman Malcolm and Ginet with John Rawls. Although Shoemaker studied Wittgenstein with Malcolm early on, his work reflects the realism and lack of discomfort with metaphysics that characterized analytic philosophy more generally beginning in the 1960s.
When I began to work on self-knowledge in graduate school with Sydney Shoemaker,...
