Mind, Meaning, and Reality Essays in Philosophy

Mind, Meaning, and Realitycontains fifteen philosophical papers by D. H. Mellor, including a new defense of "success semantics," and an introduction arguing that metaphysics can and need only be justified by doing it and not by a "meta-metaphysics," which it needs no more than physics needs metaphysics. The papers are grouped into three parts. Part I is about how the ways we are disposed to act fixes both what we believe and what we use language to mean. Part II is about what there is: the reality of dispositions; what makes beliefs and sentences true; why there is only one universe; and how social groups, and other things composed of parts, are related to the people and other things that constitute them. Part III is about time, and includes discussions of twentieth century developments in the philosophy of time; why Kant was right about tense, even though Mellor argues he was wrong about time; why forward time travel is trivial and backward time travel impossible; and what gives time its direction.

D. H. Mellor is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University of Cambridge. He was a Fellow of Pembroke College from 1964 to 1970, and a Fellow of Darwin College from 1971 to 2005. He became a Cambridge University Assistant Lecturer in Philosophy in 1965, a Lecturer in 1970, a Reader in Metaphysics in 1983, and was the Professor of Philosophy from 1986 to 1999. From 2000 to 2001 he was the University Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research.