I’m Brendan Lalor. ThereItIs.org* has been in my care for almost two decades. It’s been a political blog; it hosts resources for my students and philosophical texts I’ve edited and annotated, published in philosophical journals, contributed to discourse about cannabis, etc. The mish-mash includes food, music/audio, poetry of questionable quality . . .
Professor and Coordinator of the Philosophy Program at Castleton University, I’m a Vermont-based myco-philosopher living in the woods and working on MycoMeditations.net, a website devoted to philosophical thinking about fungi.
* – When I selected the domain name ‘ThereItIs.org’ in 2000, I was working on an existential philosophy of language, drawing on David Kaplan’s analysis of the semantics of indexicals and demonstratives – words like ‘here’, ‘now’, and ‘I’, ‘this’, ‘that’, and ‘there‘ – for which at least some aspect of meaning varies with context. This area of linguistic thought is so rich here because there don’t seem to be formal rules or interesting cross-context generalizations that capture relevant semantic uniformities. Instead, the account of meaning for demonstratives like ‘there’ arguably adverts irreducibly to skilled engagement with the world, such as following cues – like, in the case of ‘there’, the pointing gesture. There it is.
I also think that, deep down, all language contains such irreducible elements. But that’s another story.