John Capps

 I’m a Professor of Philosophy at RIT.

I specialize in epistemology, American pragmatism, and the history of 20th century Anglo-American philosophy.

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Selected Publications

Download my CV here.

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Recent reviews

  1. 2023. (With Camille Lea). Review of How to Think Like a Philosopher by Julian Baggini. Metascience.

  2. 2022. Review of Fixing the Climate: Strategies for an Uncertain World by Charles Sabel and David Victor. Dewey Studies 6:93-97.

  3. 2022. Review of A Philosopher Looks at Science by Nancy Cartwright. Metascience.

  4. 2020. Review of Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life by John Kaag. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 56: 110-113.

  5. 2020. Review of Neurath Reconsidered: New Sources and Perspectives edited by Jordi Cat and Adam Tamas Tuboly. HOPOS: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 10: 353-357.

  6. 2017. Review of Cambridge Pragmatism by Cheryl Misak. Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy.

In 2021 I started a monthly interview series “I Am an American Philosopher” for the website of The Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy (SAAP). A full list of interviews is here.

Recent Publications

  1. 2024. Epistemology, logic, and inquiry. In Sami Pihlström (Ed.), The Bloomsbury Handbook of Pragmatism. London: Bloomsbury.

  2. 2024. Responsible other-fashioning: Comments on Todd Lekan’s William James and the Moral Life. William James Studies 19: 59-67.

  3. 2023. James and Waismann on temperament in philosophy. The Pluralist 18: 46-65

  4. 2023/2019. The pragmatic theory of truth. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

  5. 2022. Pragmatism about truth-makers. Contemporary Pragmatism 19: 350-370.

  6. 2022. The less said the better: Dewey, Neurath, and mid-century theories of truth. Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie. 104: 164-191

  7. 2021. What we talk about when we talk about truth: Dewey, Wittgenstein, and the pragmatic test. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 29: 159-180.

  8. 2020. Pragmatic accounts of belief and truth: A response to Aaron Zimmerman’s Belief: a Pragmatic Picture. William James Studies 16: 39-56.

  9. 2020. Democracy, truth, and understanding: an epistemic argument for democracy. In M.C. Navin and R. Nunan (Eds.), Democracy, Populism, and Truth. New York: Springer.

  10. 2020. A Common-sense pragmatic theory of truth. Philosophia 48: 463-481.

  11. 2020. Truth and the Goldilocks principle. Think 19: 65-74.

  12. 2020. William James and the will to alieve. Contemporary Pragmatism 17: 1-20.

  13. 2019. Playing fair by William James. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 55(1): 65-70.

  14. 2018. Even worse than it seems: Transformative experience and the selection problem. Journal of Philosophical Research 43: 113-124.

  15. 2018. Did Dewey have a theory of truth? Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 54(1): 39-63

  16. 2018. The case for discussion-intensive pedagogy. APA Newsletter on Teaching Philosophy 17(2): 5-11.

  17. 2018. The Pragmatic origins of ethical expressivism: Stevenson, Dewey, and the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science. In S. Marchetti and M. Baghramian (Eds.), Pragmatism and the European Traditions: Encounters with Analytic Philosophy and Phenomenology Before the Great Divide. New York: Routledge.

  18. 2018. From global expressivism to global pragmatism. Metaphilosophy 49: 71-89.

  19. 2017. A pragmatic argument for a pragmatic theory of truth. Contemporary Pragmatism 14: 135-156.

  20. 2014. Radical pragmatism: An operator’s guide. European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 6: 125-144.

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Teaching

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I regularly teach courses on epistemology, American philosophy, logic, and contemporary philosophy. The most recent syllabi for these and other courses are below.

In Spring 2024 I taught a seminar on the Philosophy of Punishment. The syllabus for that course is here.

Syllabi

Logic (.pdf)

Contemporary Philosophy(.pdf)

Epistemology(.pdf)

American Philosophy(.pdf)

Introduction to Philosophy(.pdf)

Modern Philosophy(.pdf)

 
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