David Kaplan (philosopher)

David Benjamin Kaplan (born 1933) is an American philosopher and logician teaching at UCLA. His philosophical work focuses on logic, philosophical logic, modality, philosophy of language, metaphysics, and epistemology. He is best known for his work on demonstratives, on propositions, and on reference in intensional contexts. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1983 and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy in 2007.

Kaplan received his Ph.D. in philosophy from UCLA in 1964, where he was the last graduate student supervised by Rudolf Carnap. His thesis was entitled "Foundations of Intensional Logic". His work continues the strongly formal approach to philosophy long associated with UCLA (as represented by mathematician-logician-philosophers such as Alonzo Church and Richard Montague).

In most years, Kaplan teaches an upper division course on philosophy of language, focusing on the work of either Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, or P.F. Strawson. He also teaches a related course on Kripke's Naming and Necessity. His lively lectures often focus on selected paragraphs from Russell's "On Denoting" as well as Frege's "On Sense and Reference."

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