Department of Philosophy

Wayne A. Davis, Professor of Philosophy, Chair of the Philosophy Department, and President of the Faculty Senate.

His research interests are centered in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, epistemology, and logic, and are focused mainly on the nature of mental states (particularly belief, desire, and thought) and the concept of meaning. Professor Davis has taught at UCLA (1976), Rice (1977), Washington University (1978), and Georgetown. (1979-Present). He has been Department Chair since 1990, and Faculty Senate President since 2001. He served as Executive Faculty Chair, and was a member of the Council of Deans, from 1994 to 1997.

Professor Davis is the author of An Introduction to Logic (Prentice-Hall, 1986), Implicature (Cambridge, 1998), Meaning, Expression, and Thought (Cambridge, 2003), Nondescriptive Meaning and Reference (Oxford, 2005), plus articles on logic, philosophy of science, epistemology, philosophical psychology, and philosophy of language, and pragmatics in Philosophical Review, Mind, Philosophical Studies, Noûs, Linguistics and Philosophy, the Journal of Pragmatics, and other journals. He is Associate Editor of Philosophical Studies.

His next big project is to finish Indexical Meaning and Concepts.