• Patrick Rysiew (rhymes with the North American "issue")
  • Associate Professor of Philosophy
  • PhD, The University of Arizona (2000)

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  • Department of Philosophy
  • The University of Victoria
  • P.O. Box 3045 STN CSC
  • Victoria BC V8W-3P4 Canada
  • Phone: 250-721-7512
  • Fax: 250-721-7511
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    Research Interests

    • Epistemology - the relevance of social and evolutionary considerations to epistemic matters, epistemic value(s), testimony, rationality, naturalism, scepticism, contextualism
    • Early Modern - especially Thomas Reid and the empiricists
    • Philosophy of Language & Mind - especially the non-semantic aspects of communication and theories of 'higher' cognitive processes

    Current Courses (2007-08)

    • Philosophy 308: The Empiricists - Fall 2008 (enrolled students can log in to Blackboard here)
    • Philosophy 591: Graduate Proseminar - Fall 2008
    • Philosophy 251: Knowledge, Certainty and Skepticism - Spring 2009
    • Philosophy 490/511: The Philosophy of Thomas Reid - Spring 2009

    Publications

    • forthcoming: "Rationality Disputes - Psychology & Epistemology," Philosophy Compass
    • forthcoming: review of Thomas Reid's Theory of Perception, by Ryan Nichols (Oxford University Press, 2007), Journal of the History of Philosophy
    • forthcoming: "Fallibilism, Epistemic Possibility, and Concessive Knowledge Attributions" (with Trent Dougherty, University of Rochester), Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (here)
    • "Speaking of Knowing," Noûs, Vol. 41, No. 4 (December 2007): 627-662
    • "Beyond Words: Communication, Truthfulness, and Understanding," Episteme: A Journal of Social Epistemology, Vol. 4, No. 3 (October 2007): 285-304 (abstract)
    • "Epistemic Contextualism," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (available here)
    • "A Study in the Cognition of Individuals' Identity: Solving the Problem of Singular Cognition in Object and Agent Tracking" (with Nicolas Bullot, University of Toronto), Consciousness and Cognition, Vol. 16 (2007): 276-293
    • "Motivating the Relevant Alternatives Approach," Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 32, No. 2 (June 2006): 259-280
    • "Reidian Evidence," Journal of Scottish Philosophy, Vol. 3, Issue 2 (Autumn 2005): 107-121
    • "Contesting Contextualism," Grazer Philosophische Studien - special issue on contextualism, Vol. 69 (July 2005): 51-70
    • "Introduction," Episteme: A Journal of Social Epistemology, Vol. 1, No. 3 (2005): 163-168
    • "Tracking Objects, Tracking Agents" (with Nicolas Bullot, University of Toronto) – Interdisciplines on-line Symposium, ‘Referring to Objects’ (March 2005)
    • "Analyzing Knowledge Management Systems: A Veritistic Approach" (with Palash Bera, University of British Columbia), Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Philosophy and Informatics (Cologne; April-May 2004)
    • "Goldman's Knowledge in a Social World: Correspondence Truth and the Place of Justification in a Veritistic Social Epistemology," Protosociology, Vol. 18-19 (2003): 409-422
    • "'Encouragement in Darwin'?," Facta Philosophica, Vol. 4., Issue 2 (Fall 2002): 271-286
    • "Reid and Epistemic Naturalism," The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 52, No. 209 (October 2002): 437-456
      • winner of The Philosophical Quarterly Essay Prize, 2001
    • "The Context-Sensitivity of Knowledge Attributions," Noûs, Vol. 35, No. 4 (December 2001): 477-514 
    • "Testimony, Simulation, and the Limits of Inductivism," Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 78, No. 2 (June 2000): 269-274 
    • "Conventional Wisdom," Analysis, Vol. 60, No. 1 (January 2000): 78-83 
    • "Reid's (Mis)Characterization of Judgment," Reid Studies, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Autumn 1999): 63-68 (available here)

    Books Reviewed

    • Contextualism in Philosophy: Knowledge, Meaning, and Truth, edited by Gerhard Preyer and Georg Peter (Oxford University Press, 2005): Mind, Vol. 116, No. 464 (October 2007): 1154-1158.
    • Illocutionary Acts and Sentence Meaning, by William P. Alston (Cornell, 2000): The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 53, No. 212 (July 2003): 465-468
    • Intellectual Trust in Oneself and Others, by Richard Foley (Cambridge, 2002): Philosophy in Review, Vol. 23, No. 3 (June 2003): 178-180
    • Thomas Reid and the Story of Epistemology, by Nicholas Wolterstorff (Cambridge, 2001): Journal of the History of Philosophy, Vol. 40, No. 2 (April 2002): 260-261 
    • Implicature, by Wayne A. Davis (Cambridge, 1998): Mind, Vol. 109, No. 435 (July 2000): 573-579

    Presentations & Comments

    • Comments on E.J. Coffman's "Reliabilty and Warranted Assertability"; APA Central (Chicago; April 2008)
    • Comments on papers by Peter Ludlow, Ram Neta, and Jonathan Schaffer, New Work on Contextualism - invited Symposium; APA Pacific (Pasadena; March 2008)
    • "Making it Evident"; Department of Philosophy, University of Alberta (March 2008)
    • "Beyond Words: Linguistic Communication, Truthfulness, and the Epistemology of Testimony"; Fourth Annual Episteme Conference, on Testimony (Rutgers University; June 29-30, 2007)
    • "Blind, Bamboozled, or Otherwise Mistaken"; International Conference on Linguistics and Epistemology (University of Aberdeen; May 12-13, 2007)
    • "Epistemic Agency and the Non-Local Truth Goal: A Defence of Epistemic Value Monism"; APA Pacific (San Francisco; April 2007)
    • Comments on Lepock's "Levels of Reliabilist Appraisal: How to Make the Generality Problem Work for You"; Western Canadian Philosophical Association (Vancouver; October 2006)
    • "Epistemic Agency and the Non-Local Truth Goal"; Western Canadian Philosophical Association (Vancouver; October 2006)
    • Comments on Bedke's "Developmental Process Reliabilism and a Theory of Evidence"; APA Pacific (Portland; March 2006)
    • "Attributing Knowledge, Attributing Error: Contextualism, the Disappearance Effect, and 'Semantic Self-Knowledge'"; CPA Annual Congress (London, Ontario; May 2005)
    • "Sensing Color, Perceiving Figure" (Comments on Grandi's, "Colour and Visible Figure: Dugald Stewart's Criticism of Reid"); Western Canadian Philosophical Association (Victoria; October 2004)
    • "Beyond Knowledge Itself: The Place of Reason(s) in a Naturalistic Epistemology"; Canadian Society for Epistemology, Summer Workshop on Recent Epistemology - The Program of Naturalism (Sherbrooke; May 2004)
    • "Epistemic Commitments, Invariantist WAMs, and the Knowledge Account of Assertion" (Comments on Pritchard's "Contextualism, Skepticism and 'Warranted Assertability Maneuvres'"); Inland Northwest Philosophy Conference (Moscow-Pullman; April-May 2004)
    • "Analyzing Knowledge Management Systems: A Veritistic Approach" (coauthor: Palash Bera, UBC); First International Workshop on Philosophy and Informatics (Cologne; March-April 2004)
    • "Adaptive Cognition"; APA Pacific (Pasadena; March 2004)
    • "Evidence, Evidentness, and Self-Evidence in Reid"; Reid Society, APA Pacific (Pasadena; March 2004)
    • "The Banality of the Relevant Alternatives Approach"; Western Canadian Philosophical Association (Lethbridge; October 2003)
    • "Mysterianism, and Other Immodest Views of the Mind" (Comments on Copenhaver's, "Is Reid a Mysterian?"); Northwest Philosophy Conference (Portland; October 2003)
    • "Goldman's Veritistic Social Epistemology: Truth, Knowledge, and (Other) Epistemic Goods"; CPA Annual Congress (Halifax; May-June 2003)
    • "Epistemic Discourse"; Department of Philosophy, University of Victoria (November 2002)
    • "'Encouragement in Darwin'?"; Western Canadian Philosophical Association (Calgary; October 2002)
    • "Speaking of Knowing"; Department of Philosophy, Simon Fraser University (March 2002) 
    • "'Encouragement in Darwin'?"; BC Philosophy Conference, hosted by UBC (May 2002) 
    • "Coordination and Two Notions of What Is Said" (with Rob Stainton, University of Western Ontario). Invited paper at the Conference on Context, Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas, UNAM, Mexico City (October 31, 2001)
    • "'Competing' Conceptions of What is Said"; Department of Linguistics, UBC (November 2001) 
    • "Peter Graham's ‘Locke and Hume on Testimony and the Grounds of Belief': Two Questions"; 28th Hume Society Conference (Victoria BC; July 2001) 
    • Comments on Vinci's "The Argument Structure of Quine's 'Epistemology Naturalized'"; CPA Annual Congress (Quebec City; May 2001) 
    • "Reid and Epistemic Naturalism"; APA Pacific (San Francisco; March 2001) 
    • "Reid and Epistemic Naturalism"; UBC Philosophy Colloquium (March 2001)
    • "Testimony, Simulation and the Limits of Inductivism"; APA Central (New Orleans; May 1999) 
    • "Conventional Wisdom"; APA Eastern (Washington, DC; Dec 1998) 
    • "On Some Aspects of Reid's Theory of Natural Signs"; CPA Annual Congress (Ottawa; May 1998)

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