Lee Walters
Somerville College
Oxford, OX2 6HD
Email
About Me
I'm a philosopher at the University of Oxford, where I'm a fellow of Somerville College and a member of the Faculty of Philosophy. I'm also the editor of the Conditionals, Fictional Characters, and Empty Names categories of PhilPapers.
Prior to joining Oxford, I took an MA, MPhil, and PhD in Philosophy at University College London. Originally from Bedworth, Warwickshire, I studied economics at LSE, and then worked for HM Treasury and McKinsey & Co. before studying philosophy.
My Research
I work on a range of issues in metaphysics, aesthetics, and the philosophy of logic and language. My current research is primarily focussed on three areas: the metaphysics of art; the logic and semantics of conditionals; and, singular thought and nonexistence.
Most of my work on conditionals defends the standard Stalnaker-Lewis logic of counterfactuals, by (i) defusing putative counterexamples, (ii) arguing against semantics which validate alternative logics, and (iii) offering direct arguments for the standard logic. In addition, I am working on defending a truth-conditional account of indicative conditionals.
In my work on aesthetics, I argue for a creationist account of repeatable artworks, which treats them as types, and grounds the truth about them in the relevant creative acts and historical productive chains.
I also argue for an account of fictional characters that accommodates both our realist and irrealist thought and talk. This comprises two parts. First, continuous with my work on repeatable artworks, I defend a creationist account of fictional characters. Second, in order to account for our irrealist thought about fictional characters, I argue that fictional names are systematically polysemous, having both a use on which they refer to fictional characters, and a use on which they are empty, which allows for true fictional negative existentials and other aspects of our irrealist thought.
I am a signatory of the Online Petition in Support of the Gendered Conference Campaign; please visit here for details.
