Jonathan Schaffer

For the computer scientist, see Jonathan Schaeffer. For the musician, see Jon Schaffer.

Jonathan Schaffer is an American philosopher specializing in metaphysics and epistemology.

Since earning his PhD from Rutgers in 1999, Schaffer has published 56 papers. He wrote his dissertation - "Causation and the Probabilities of Processes" - under Brian McLaughlin. David Lewis served as outside examiner. In 2000, he accepted a position as assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in Amherst, Massachusetts, earning tenure by 2004.

In 2007, Schaffer accepted a permanent research position at the Australian National University. He subsequently won awards for two papers published that year, the American Philosophical Association's 2008 Article Prize, for "Knowing the Answer" in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, and the Australasian Journal of Philosophy's 2008 Best Paper Award, for "From Nihilism to Monism".

In 2010, Schaffer accepted a permanent position at Rutgers University.

Papers

Drafts and reconstructions are not included. See his webpage and his updated CV for a current list of published articles, talks, etc.

Metaphysics

• Truthmaker Commitments
• Truth and Fundamentality: On Merrick's Truth and Ontology
• Monism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
• From Nihilism to Monism
• Quiddistic Knowledge
• Of Ghostly and Mechanical Events
• Two Conceptions of Sparse Properties
• Is There a Fundamental Level?
• The Problem of Free Mass: Must Properties Cluster?
• The Individuation of Tropes
• Monism: The Priority of the Whole

Epistemology

• The Irrelevance of the Subject: Against Subject-Sensitive Invariantism
• Knowing the Answer
• Closure, Contrast, and Answer
• From Contextualism to Contrastivism
• Perceptual Knowledge Derailed
• Skepticism, Contextualism, and Discrimination
• Knowledge, Relevant Alternatives, and Missed Clues

Causation

• Deterministic Chance?
• Review of Dowe and Noordhof's Cause and Chance: Causation in an Indeterministic World
• Contrastive Causation
• Counterfactuals, Causal Independence, and Conceptual Circularity
• Causes Need Not be Physically Connected to their Effects: The Case for Negative Causation
• Principled Chances
• The Metaphysics of Causation (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
• Overdetermining Causes
• Review of Dowe's Physical Causation
• Causation, Influence, and Effluence
• Causes as Probability-Raisers of Processes
• Causation by Disconnection
• Overlappings: Probability-Raising without Causation
• Trumping Preemption