Jason Stanley


Jason Stanley is an American philosopher who is the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. He is best known for his contributions to philosophy of language and epistemology, which often draw upon and influence other fields, including linguistics and cognitive science. He has also written for a popular audience on the New York Times philosophy blog "The Stone". In his more recent work, Stanley has brought tools from philosophy of language and epistemology to bear on questions of political philosophy, especially in his 2015 book How Propaganda Works.

Education

Stanley graduated from Corcoran High School in his hometown of Syracuse, New York. He studied in Lünen, Germany, from 1985 to 1986 as part of the Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange, after which he enrolled in the State University of New York in Binghamton, NY, where he studied philosophy of language under Jack Kaminsky. In 1987 he transferred to University of Tübingen, but returned to the State University of New York in 1988, this time at the Stony Brook campus. There, he studied philosophy and linguistics under Peter Ludlow and Richard Larson. Stanley received his BA in May 1990, and went on to receive his PhD from MIT in January 1995 with Robert Stalnaker as his thesis advisor.

Academic career

After receiving his doctorate, Stanley accepted a position at University College, Oxford, as a stipendiary lecturer. He returned from England shortly thereafter to New York to teach at Cornell University. In 2000, he left Cornell and became an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In 2004, he moved to the department of philosophy at Rutgers University, where he taught from 2004 to 2013. In March 2013 he accepted a professorship at Yale University. His book Knowledge and Practical Interests won the 2007 American Philosophical Association book prize.

Publications