Work
Soames specializes in the philosophy of language and the history of analytic philosophy. He has published books and articles primarily on issues concerning truth, reference, and meaning. Fairly early in his career, he and Nathan Salmon edited a book entitled Propositions and Attitudes (1989), a collection of readings that investigates philosophical issues surrounding the nature of propositions. Later in his career, Soames has been known for expanding on the anti-descriptivist philosophy of language developed by Saul Kripke in Naming and Necessity (1972/1980)—see Soames's Beyond Rigidity: The Unfinished Semantic Agenda of 'Naming and Necessity' (2002). He is also a major critic of two-dimensionalist theories of semantics—see his Reference and Description: The Case against Two-Dimensionalism (2005).
Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century (2003), his two-volume history of analytic philosophy developed from a lecture course regularly given at Princeton, has been the subject of significant controversy among historians of analytic philosophy, with exchanges, often heated, on the Notre Dame Philosophical Review, Brian Weatherson's blog, the journal The Philosophical Quarterly, and Soames's own web page.
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“Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.”
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