Books by Richard (University of Liverpool) Gaskin

Richard Gaskin offers an original defence of literary humanism, according to which works of imaginative literature have an objective meaning which is fixed at the time of production and not subject to individual readers' responses. He shows that the appreciation of literature is a cognitive activity fully on a par with scientific investigation.

Richard Gaskin analyses what is distinctive about sentences and the propositions they express-what marks them off from mere aggregates of words and meanings respectively. Since he identifies the world with all the true and false propositions, his account has significant implications for our understanding of the nature of reality.

John McDowell's 'minimal empiricism' is one of the most influential and widely discussed doctrines in contemporary philosophy. This work subjects it to examination and criticism, arguing that it has unacceptable consequences, and that it mistakenly rules out something we know to be the case: that infants and non-human animals experience a world.