David Benjamin Kaplan (1933) is an American philosopher and logician teaching at UCLA. He is known in particular for his work on demonstratives, on propositions, and on reference in opaque (intensional) contexts. A philosopher is a person who thinks deeply regarding people, society, the world, and/or the universe. ... A logician is a philosopher, mathematician, or other whose topic of scholarly study is logic. ... The University of California, Los Angeles, popularly known as UCLA, is a public, coeducational university situated in the neighborhood of Westwood within the city of Los Angeles. ... Demonstratives are deictic words that indicate which entities a speaker refers to, and distinguishes those entities from others. ... Proposition is a term used in logic to describe the content of assertions. ... In general, a reference is something that refers or points to something else, or acts as a connection or a link between two things. ...

His philosophical areas of interest are the following: Logic, Philosophical logic, Modality, Philosophy of language, Metaphysics, and Epistemology. Logic, from Classical Greek λόγος (logos), originally meaning the word, or what is spoken, (but coming to mean thought or reason) is most often said to be the study of criteria for the evaluation of arguments, although the exact definition of logic is a matter of controversy among philosophers. ... Philosophical logic is the study of the more specifically philosophical aspects of logic. ... In music, modality is the subject concerning certain diatonic scales known as modes (e. ... Philosophy of language is the branch of philosophy that studies language. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Knowledge. ...

David Kaplan received his PhD in philosophy from UCLA in 1964, where he was the student of Rudolf Carnap. His thesis was titled "Foundations of Intensional Logic". His formative years as a philosopher were influenced by the presence of important figures in the analytical philosophy tradition at UCLA, such as Alonzo Church and Richard Montague. Rudolf Carnap (May 18, 1891, Ronsdorf Germany - September 14, 1970, Los Angeles) was a philosopher, active in central Europe before 1935, and in the United States thereafter. ... Analytic philosophy is the dominant philosophical movement of English-speaking countries. ... Alonzo Church (June 14, 1903 – August 11, 1995) was an American mathematician and logician who was responsible for some of the foundations of theoretical computer science. ... Richard Merett Montague (1930–1971) was an American mathematician and philosopher. ...

Typically, every year at UCLA Kaplan teaches an upper division course on philosophy of language, focusing on the work of either Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, or P.F. Strawson. His lively lectures often focus on selected paragraphs from Russell's "On Denoting" as well as Frege's "On Sense and Reference." The University of California, Los Angeles, popularly known as UCLA, is a public, coeducational university situated in the neighborhood of Westwood within the city of Los Angeles. ... Philosophy of language is the branch of philosophy that studies language. ... Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege (8 November 1848, Wismar – 26 July 1925, Bad Kleinen) was a German mathematician who evolved into a logician and philosopher. ... Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970), was a British philosopher, logician, and mathematician, working mostly in the 20th century. ... Peter Frederick Strawson (born November 23, 1919 in London) is a philosopher associated with the ordinary language philosophy movement within analytical philosophy. ... On Denoting is one of the most important and influential philosophical essays of all of the 20th century. ...

Publications

• "Quantifying In," Synthese, XIX 1968.
• "Dthat," Syntax and Semantics, vol. 9, ed. P. Cole (New York: Academic Press, 1978); and reprinted in The Philosophy of Language, ed. A. P. Martinich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).
• "Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice," in Approaches to Natural Language (J.Hintikka et. al., eds.), Reidel, 1973.
• "How to Russell a Frege-Church," The Journal of Philosophy, LXXII 1975.
• "Opacity," in W.V. Quine (L. Hahn, ed.) Open Court, 1986.
• "Demonstratives" and "Afterthoughts" in Themes From Kaplan (Almog, et al., eds.), Oxford 1989.
• "Words," The Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume, LXIV 1990
• "A Problem in Possible World Semantics," in Modality, Morality, and Belief (W. Sinnott-Armstrong et al.,eds.) Cambridge, 1995.

W. V. Quine Willard Van Orman Quine (June 25, 1908 - December 25, 2000) was one of the most influential American philosophers and logicians of the 20th century. ...

External links

• Kaplan's UCLA website