Conversation with Ernie Lepore

Ernie Lepore is a Board of Governors professor of philosophy. He is the author of numerous books and papers in the philosophy of language, philosophical logic, metaphysics and philosophy of mind, including with Matthew Stone, Imagination and Convention (Oxford University Press, 2015), Meaning, Mind and Matter: Philosophical Essays, with Barry Loewer (Oxford University Press, 2011), Liberating Content (2016) and Language turned on itself (2007, Oxford University Press), Insensitive Semantics (2004, Basil Blackwell) both with Herman Cappelen, Donald Davidson: Meaning, Truth, Language and Reality, (Oxford University Press, 2005) and Donald Davidson's truth-theoretic Semantics, (Oxford University Press, 2007) both with Kirk Ludwig, Meaning and Argument, and co-authored, with Jerry Fodor, Holism: A Shopper's Guide (Blackwell, 1991) and The Compositionality Papers (Oxford University Press, 2002); and with Sarah-Jane Leslie What Every Student Should Know (Rutgers Press, 2002). He has edited several books, including Handbook in Philosophy of Language, ed. (with B. Smith, Oxford University Press, 2006), Truth and Interpretation (Blackwell, 1989), and is co-editor with Zenon Pylyshyn, of What is Cognitive Science? (Blackwell, 1999). He is also general editor of the Blackwell series "Philosophers and Their Critics". In this interview, Professor Lepore discusses the social role of philosophy and its connection to empirical science. He answers questions about his main research interests and especially about the role of intuitions in philosophy, the figurative uses of language, the failure of the project of radical interpretation, and externalism and internalism. The last part of the interview is devoted to a remembrance of Jerry Fodor.