Margaret Anne Cameron
Contact Info
Email: margaret@uvic.ca
Office: CLE B326
Hours: Mondays and Thursdays 3:00-4:30 and by appt.
Phone:
Biography
Currently I am the Canada Research Council Chair in the Aristotelian Tradition (Tier II) and an associate professor in the department of philosophy at the University of Victoria.
I work in the Aristotelian tradition of logic and philosophy of language, as well as the history of the philosophy of language more broadly. I have published articles in The Cambridge Companion to Boethius, The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Philosophy, Vivarium, History of Philosophy Quarterly, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, and the Archives d’histoire doctrinale du moyen âge grec et latin, as well as in a number of other book publications.
From 2006-2008 I was a Research Fellow at Cambridge University where I co-hosted a number of international conferences on Aristotelian logic in Latin, Greek and Arabic traditions, on the basis of which I (with John Marenbon) published a special topics volume entitled Aristotle, language and the theory of argument, east and west, 500-1500: the medieval tradition of On Interpretation and the Prior Analytics, in Vivarium: An International Journal for the Philosophy and Intellectual Life of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, 48/1-2 (2010), as well as Methods and methodologies: Aristotelian logic east and west 500-1500 (Brill Publishers, 2010). Currently under contract with Oxford University Press is Linguistic Content: New Essays on the History of the Philosophy of Language, which I am co-editing (with Robert Stainton) and to which I am contributing. Our goal is to bring the diverse and important history of philosophy of language to the attention of philosophers in order to contribute to and enrich the current field of research.
I am also currently mounting a digital project: Dialectica – The Aristotelian Logical Tradition (on-line in August 2012). In light of the recent, and very exciting, advent of the massive uploading of digitized library collections, the aim of this project is to create a digital portal to the Aristotelian logical tradition in the medieval, renaissance and early modern periods, with links to the uploaded digital materials and secondary source materials. My goal is to create a virtual presence and research tool for the vast and important Aristotelian logical tradition, organized according to each of the logical texts (including Porphyry’s Isagoge and the Liber de sex principiis) that formed the Organon. I am also creating a sourcebook for the study of the history of the philosophy of language: History of the Philosophy of Language - Sources (on-line April 2012).
Last year I was awarded a SSHRC research grant to complete a monograph on the history of Aristotelian philosophy of language, to be called On interpretation: the fate of a passage.
Curriculum Vitae
Courses Currently Taught
As taught by Margaret Ann Cameron
What would you do if you had an invisibility ring? Are you being systematically deceived by an evil genius? Should we throw a man in front of a moving train to save others in danger? These and other familiar thought experiments have played a major role in philosophical debates. They rely on the use of our imagination to explore difficult philosophical topics. But what do we learn from them? How do we learn from them? What can the imagination contribute to the pursuit of philosophical truth? In this seminar we will examine the role of thought experimentation in philosophy. To do so, we will investigate, first, philosophical theories of imagination and, second, debates about the nature and use of thought experimentation in philosophy. We will compare thought experiments to other sorts of experimentation. Recently, the use and value of traditional thought experiments have been called into question by those who promote "Experimental Philosophy". We will examine some of these recent debates.As taught by Margaret Ann Cameron
Does the history of philosophy matter to philosophers practicing today? Is the history of philosophy part of the discipline of philosophy itself? Is there progress in philosophy? When does history matter? Why does it matter?