About Me

My name is Rory Harder.

I completed my PhD last year at the University of Toronto. This fall I am beginning a postdoctoral fellowship at University College Dublin (look here for some information on my postdoc project).

To the right is a picture of me atop a mountain in Poland!

Here is my CV.

You can e-mail me at [firstname][lastname]@gmail.com.

Research

My research addresses issues in the philosophy of language and mind concerning joint action, that which occurs for instance with two people walking or talking together, or simply sharing an experience. What role does such engagement play in our lives as rational agents? What individual mental capacities does such engagement draw upon, and perhaps even help develop? I am especially concerned with linguistic communication as one form of our joint action—yet with a distinctive character—and in particular the meaning and use of demonstratives: words such as this and that.

Here are my papers, in various stages of progress.

• Clearing up Clouds: Underspecification in Demonstrative Communication. In press at Canadian Journal of Philosophy. (Journal/PhilPapers)
• Joint Attention and Communication. In press at Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. (Journal/PhilPapers)
• [A paper on the formal semantics of demonstratives and definite descriptions]. Revised and resubmitted.
• [A paper on theory of mind and knowledge-first epistemology]. Under review.
• Bishops and Uniqueness (with Lukas Lewerentz). Manuscript in preparation.
• Insinuation and Common Ground. Manuscript in Preparation.

Teaching

I have taught first-year introductions to philosophy and upper-year seminars on the philosophy of mind and language at the University of Toronto. I have taught first-year introductions to formal reasoning and decision-making at Rutgers University. Here is a statement of my teaching philosophy, and some more details regarding my teaching experience.