1: When did you start thinking about philosophy?
EL: My first exposure to philosophy was through two "philosophical" novels I read in high school: Camus' The Stranger and Sartre's Nausea. A friend of mine recommended them but I found them weird. I believe my real introduction to philosophy came from a very different source. My close childhood friend Brian McLaughlin and I both grew up in an environment where there was not a lot of interest in the arts and the humanities, e.g., in classical music, art, literature, poetry. Instead of reading the classics and writing poetry or visiting the great museums that were all just a short bus ride from where we lived in New Jersey, Brian and I literally spent hours upon hours analyzing all of our interactions with anyone we encountered —in retrospect I realize this practice was mostly a form of self-protection. To us, all newcomers were potential threats with whom we could not feel until we could explain their intentions to ourselves, or at least show they meant us no harm. And I think my real introduction to the practice of philosophy began unwittingly back then with these exercises in unearthing the practical reasoning of others. Some discussions would run into the wee hours of the next morning. And in the process, we concocted some of the most bizarre accounts of why others behaved as they did. You know, the way philosophers usually behave.
Interviste
Conversation with Ernie Lepore
di Domenica Bruni
07.05.2022
Ernie Lepore è professore di filosofia del Consiglio del Governo della Rutgers University. È autore di numerosi libri e articoli di filosofia del linguaggio, logica, metafisica e filosofia della mente, tra cui, con Matthew Stone, Imagination and Convention (Oxford University Press, 2015), Meaning, Mind and Matter: Philosophical Essays, con Barry Loewer (Oxford University Press, 2011), Liberating Content (2016) e Language turned on itself (2007, Oxford University Press), Insensitive Semantics (2004, Basil Blackwell) entrambi con Herman Cappelen, Donald Davidson: Meaning, Truth, Language and Reality, (Oxford University Press, 2005) e Donald Davidson's truth-theoretic Semantics, (Oxford University Press, 2007) entrambi con Kirk Ludwig, Meaning and Argument, e co-autore, con Jerry Fodor, Holism: A Shopper's Guide (Blackwell, 1991) e The Compositionality Papers (Oxford University Press, 2002); e con Sarah-Jane Leslie What Every Student Should Know (Rutgers Press, 2002). Ha curato diversi libri, tra cui Handbook in Philosophy of Language, ed. (con B. Smith, Oxford University Press, 2006), Truth and Interpretation (Blackwell, 1989), ed è co-editore con Zenon Pylyshyn, di What is Cognitive Science? (Blackwell, 1999). È anche curatore generale della serie Blackwell "Philosophers and Their Critics".
In questa intervista, il professor Lepore discute il ruolo sociale della filosofia e il suo legame con la scienza empirica. Risponde a domande sui suoi principali interessi di ricerca e soprattutto sul ruolo delle intuizioni in filosofia, sugli usi figurati del linguaggio, sul fallimento del progetto di interpretazione radicale, sull'esternalismo e l'internalismo. L'ultima parte dell'intervista è dedicata a un ricordo di Jerry Fodor.
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