Jennifer Hornsby

Jennifer Hornsby (born 1951) is a British philosopher with interests in the philosophies of mind, action, language, as well as feminist philosophy. She is currently a professor at the School of Philosophy, Birkbeck, University of London. She is well-known for her opposition to orthodoxy in current analytic philosophy of mind, and for her use of J.L. Austin's Speech Act Theory to look at the effects of pornography.

Biography

Jennifer Hornsby earned her Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge under the direction of Bernard Williams. She also earned a B.A. and M.Phil. from Oxford and London, respectively. She taught at the University of Oxford for a number of years before moving to Birkbeck College, London. She was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1996 to 1997. (See [http://www.bbk.ac.uk/phil/staff/academics/hornsby Hornsby's Profile] at Birkbeck College, London.)

Work

Hornsby's work focuses primarily on the philosophies of mind, action, language, and feminist philosophy.

Actions

Hornsby's action theory is largely influenced by the philosophy of Donald Davidson. In her book "Actions" (1980), she argues for a theory according to which actions are primarily accounted for by how the agent conceives of her action, rather than how, say, a physiologist does. She writes that "The aim of the book as a whole is to investigate the nature of actions seen as revelations of the human mind" (1980, p. 1).

She is well-known for using the distinction between the "transitive" use of a verb versus the "intransitive" use in order to clear up what she takes to be confusions in action theory. The transitive use requires a grammatical object, while the intransitive does not. The difference may be exemplified by "John moved his arm" (transitive use of "moved") versus "John's arm moved" (intransitive use of "moved"). According to Hornsby, all actions are bodily movements, provided that "movements" is transitive, not intransitive (1980, p.3).

Publications

The following is a partial list of Hornsby's publications.

Books

* "Actions" (1980), Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.
* "Simple Mindedness: A Defence of Naïve Naturalism in the Philosophy of Mind" (1997), Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

Edited Collections

* "Ethics: A Feminist Reader" (with Elizabeth Frazer and Sabina Lovibond) (1992)
* "The Cambridge Companion to Feminism in Philosophy" (with Miranda Fricker) (2000)
* "Reading Philosophy: Selected Texts with a Method for Beginners" (with Samuel Guttenplan and Christopher Janaway), (2002)
* "Reading Philosophy of Language: Selected Texts with Interactive Commentary" (with Guy Longworth) (2005)

Articles

Mind and action

* "Anomalousness in Action," in "The Philosophy of Donald Davidson", ed. Lewis E.Hahn (Library of Living Philosophers, Open Court, Chicago IL, 1999), 623–36.
* "Personal and Sub-Personal: A Defence of Dennett’s Original Distinction," in "New Essays on Psychological Explanation", eds. M. Elton & J. Bermudez, (Special Issue of Philosophical Explorations) 2000, 6–24.
* "Agency and Actions," in "Agency and Action", eds. H. Steward and J. Hyman (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1–23.
* "Alienated Agents," in "Naturalism in Question", eds. M, De Caro and D. Macarthur (Harvard University Press, 2004), 173–87.

Language and feminism

* "Speech Acts and Pornography," Women’s Philosophy Review, 1993. Reprinted in "The Problem of Pornography", ed. Susan Dwyer (Wadsworth, 1995) 220–32.
* "Illocution and its Significance," in "Foundations of Speech Act Theory: Philosophical and Linguistic Perspectives", ed. S.L.Tsohatzidis (Routledge) 1994, 187–207.
* "Disempowered Speech," in "Feminist Perspectives on Language, Knowledge and Reality" (Philosophical Topics 23.2) ed. S. Haslanger (University of Arkansas Press, 1995) 127–47.
* "Free Speech and Illocution," (with Rae Langton) "Legal Theory" 4 (1998): 21–37.
* "Feminism in Philosophy of Language: Communicative Speech Acts," in "The Cambridge Companion to Feminism in Philosophy", eds. M. Fricker and J. Hornsby (Cambridge University Press, 2000) 87–106.
* "How to Think About Derogatory Words," in "Figurative Language" (Midwest Studies in Philosophy, XXV), eds. P. French & H. Wettstein (Blackwell Publishers, 2001) 128–41.
* "Free Speech and Hate Speech: Language and Rights," in "Normativity, Facts, and Values", eds. R. Egidi, M. Dell’Utri, and M. De Caro (Quodlibet, Macerata, 2003) 297–310.

Truth and metaphysics

* "Truth: The Identity Theory," "Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society" 97 (1997) 1–24. Reprinted in "Truth", ed. Michael Lynch (MIT Press, 2001) 663–81.
* "Dealing with Facts," in a Symposium on Stephen Neale’s Facing Facts, "Philosophy and Phenomenological Research" (forthcoming 2005).
* "Physicalism, Conceptual Analysis, and Acts of Faith," in "Minds, Worlds & Conditionals: Essays in Honour of Frank Jackson", ed. I. Ravenscroft (Oxford University Press, forthcoming [2005] ).
* "Truth without Truthmaking Entities," in "Truthmakers", eds. H. Beebee and J. Dodd (Oxford University Press,

External links

* [http://www.bbk.ac.uk/phil/staff/academics/hornsby Hornsby's Profile] at the School of Philosophy, Birkbeck, University of London.