JAMES A. WOODBRIDGE

 

At home with Piper, July 2026
This page contains information about


1. About Me

I am (since 2006) a transplant to Las Vegas and (since 2026, after my stints as Assistant Prof. and then Associate Prof.) a Professor in the Philosophy Department at UNLV. This Fall (2026) semester I am teaching Philosophy of Language and Introduction to Philosophy (through Science Fiction). This past Spring I taught Philosophy of Science and Intro. Over other recent semesters I have co-taught (with Ian Dove) Aesthetics and Philosophy and Film and on my own taught a Senior (Capstone) Seminar on Theories of Truth, Metaphysics, a Senior (Capstone) Seminar on Fiction and Fictionalism, and Great Philosophers: Wittgenstein. In Spring 2020 I was on leave, getting more expertise in linguistics (mainly Chomsky and Tomasello). In other past terms I have taught Philosophy of Mathematics (with Ian Dove), Advanced Logic, Introduction to Symbolic Logic, and a First-Year Seminar (COLA 100LA) course on Science Fiction and Philosophy. Before coming to UNLV, I was a reluctant academic nomad, teaching at such institutions as Yale University (2005-6), The University of Michigan (2004-5), The College of William and Mary (2001-4), and New York University (1999-2001). I've taught a variety of classes at these different places, including Philosophy of Mind, Language and Mind, a First-Year Seminar on Relativism, and Ethics.

I am (in origin and demeanor) a northeasterner. I grew up in Glastonbury, Connecticut but managed to escape the suburbs every summer at Camp Quinebarge in New Hampshire, where I spent most of my time hiking in the White Mountains. I did an undergraduate degree at Amherst College in Massachusetts, where I also devoted a lot of time to singing, both in the men's Glee Club and in an a cappella group called the DQ that I helped "revive". During my college years I spent three summers living in a tent and working outrageous hours at the Columbia Wards salmon fishery in Kenai, Alaska. After graduating from Amherst with a double major in philosophy and physics, I spent a year traveling around the world, mostly in New Zealand, Australia, China, Thailand, Nepal, India, Italy, Germany, and Croatia. When I got back to the U.S. I lived in Boston for two years and worked as a research technician at the Harvard School of Public Health. My (rather strange) job there involved making computer models of human and dog rib cages for use in the study of respiratory mechanics. (Here is an abstract.) From Boston I moved to Ann Arbor to pursue a graduate degree in philosophy at the University of Michigan (Go Blue). I spent the last three years of my overlong graduate career in NYC, writing my dissertation and adjunct teaching at NYU and Brooklyn College. After finally completing my Ph.D., I moved to Virginia to teach at William & Mary, and then three years later I returned to Ann Arbor to spend a year teaching for my old alma mater (Go Blue, uh, again). After that, I ended up back in my old home state of CT for a year, teaching at Yale. Now I'm based here, in the middle of a desert, in the craziest city on earth.

2. My Interests

Outside of academic pursuits, I'm trying (albeit, not very successfully...) to get back into rock climbing, after a very long break from it. (Here are some old pictures from way, way back when.) I'm just trying to get back to gym climbing for now (but I also aspire to get back out to Red Rock Canyon and Porcelain Wall on Mt. Potosi). My main non-academic interest these days is music, mostly "indie" or "college" rock from the past four decades (as in Galaxie 500, Pixies, My Bloody Valentine, Liz Phair, Pavement, Wolf Parade, Le Butcherettes, Ty Segall, LCD Soundsystem) and early 70s rock (as in Zeppelin, Bowie (of course), T. Rex, Big Star), blues, post-war jazz, real country music (as in Hank Williams, Loretta Lynn, Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard), and bluegrass/old time. From 2007-2012 I booked a lot of indie rock shows in several venues in Downtown Las Vegas, and I co-organized the then twice-yearly Neon Reverb Festival--which returned in 2016-2018 as a once-yearly March event after a 3-year hiatus (and is looking to revive again soon after another hiatus!) Other interests include movies from the 30's and 40's, science fiction, traveling(!), and camping. And now there is my new rescue dog, Piper (pictured above)! My previous long-time dog companions (pictured with me in a few photos here), Rufus (the bigger one) and Baxter (the Boston Terrier), have crossed over the rainbow bridge (Rufus in October 2024 and Baxter in March 2026), in both cases several months past their 15th birthdays. I miss them, but Piper's company is making things better. (Scout, you are also missed, you funny beast.)

3. What I Work On

My philosophical interests include the philosophy of language and mind, metaphysics, and philosophical logic. I mainly focus on the topic of truth and have developed (since 2009 in collaboration with Bradley Armour-Garb) a novel analysis of truth-talk (the fragment of language that employs the notion of truth). The view has connections with deflationism about truth (a general approach that also is really more an analysis of truth-talk than one of truth itself, although it has implications for that more traditional issue). Deflationism holds that truth-talk serves only a logico-linguistic expressive function of providing a natural-language a means of generalizing on embedded-sentence positions. For example, we say "Everything the Oracle says is true" to generalize on the particular case of "If the Oracle says that birds are dinosaurs, then birds are dinosaurs". Deflationism thus denies that truth-talk really functions to describe anything (e.g., a statement or a belief) by attributing any kind of substantial property or relation. Brad and I have a new (2025) book on this published by OUP, The Deflationary Approach to Truth: A Guide. (A very brief introduction to deflationism that I wrote up as a graduate student is available here.) The related analysis of truth-talk that I developed in my dissertation, and which Brad and I have improved and refined over the past two decades, is a kind of fictionalism about truth-talk, one that sees this way of talking as part of an established, rule-governed semantic pretense. Truth-talk is a pretense-based figure of speech that we employ in order make certain non-semantic claims (in particular, certain kinds of general claims) we could not otherwise make. Brad and I explain this view (and fictionalism in general), and apply it to resolve the Liar Paradox and its kin, in our 2015 CUP book Pretense and Pathology: Philosophical Fictionalism and its Applications.

My curriculum vitae has more information about my work and background.

My paper "Truth as a Pretense" lays out the basic details of my original views on truth-talk. A (much) shorter "talk-version" is available here.

Other recent work:

4. My Teaching

At University of Nevada, Las Vegas: At Yale University: At The University of Michigan: At The College of William and Mary: At New York University:

5. Philosophy Web Sites


You can contact me at:



Last updated July 24, 2026
This site is maintained by James A. Woodbridge

This document was created on September 3, 1997.