HUGH WILDER  Professor Philosophy College of Charleston 66 George Street Charleston, SC 29424-0001 office: 14 Glebe, Room 202 tel: (843) 953-5491 fax: (843) 953-6388 e-mail: wilderh@cofc.edu Professor Wilder's Home Page

HUGH WILDER (Ph.D. in Philosophy, University of Western Ontario, 1973)  I taught at Miami University from 1972 to 1981, and have been on the faculty at the College of Charleston since 1981.  I served as Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies from 1991 to 2000, and as Speaker of the Faculty of the College from 2001 to 2004.  I have also served two six-month terms as Interim Dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, in 1996 and 2006.   I have published on a variety of topics in philosophy of language, epistemology and aesthetics; a primary focus has been on issues in cognitive ethology – How can humans study non-human minds?  I held a year-long National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship at Princeton University (1976-77), and have participated in several NEH Summer Seminars and Institutes.  I was a member of the School of Criticism and Theory at Northwestern University (1985), and spent sabbatical leaves at the University of Colorado, Boulder (1986-87) and the University of California, Davis (1997-98).  I am a competitive masters swimmer, have been married to Pana Wilder for nearly forty years, and have two sons.

Selected Publications:

Language in Primates: Perspectives and Implications, co-edited with Judith de Luce (Springer-Verlag, 1983). 

"Lewis and Quine on Private Meanings and Subjectivism," Canadian Journal of Philosophy (1971). 

"Quine on Natural Kinds," Australasian Journal of Philosophy (1972). 

"Meanings and Demons," Philosophical Studies (1976). 

"Tolerance and Teaching Philosophy," Metaphilosophy (1978). 

"Practical Reason and the Logic of Imperatives," Metaphilosophy (1980). 

"The Immorality of Textualism," Politics, Society and the Humanities, Sanderlin and Barrow, eds. (Southern Humanities Press, 1984). 

"Provocation on Belief," Social Epistemology (1987). 

"Intention and the Very Idea of Fiction," Philosophy and Literature (1988). 

"Representation Redux," Metaphilosophy (1988). 

"Interpretive Cognitive Ethology," Interpretation and Explanation in the Study of Behavior, Bekoff and Jamieson, eds. (Westview, 1990). 

"Against Naive Mentalism," Metaphilosophy (1991).