About Scott Soames

I was an undergraduate in philosophy at Stanford University, and a graduate student studying Linguistics and Philosophy at M. I. T., where I received my Ph.D. in philosophy in 1976.

I taught philosophy at Yale University from 1976 – 1980, when I moved to Princeton University, where I taught from 1980 – 2004. I joined the faculty of USC in the Fall of 2004, and served as Director of the School of Philosophy from 2007-2022. My specialties are the philosophy of language, history of analytic philosophy, and the philosophy of law.

My books include: The Analytic Tradition in Philosophy, Vol 2: A New Vision, Princeton 2018). Rethinking Language, Mind, and Meaning (Princeton 2015), The Analytic Tradition in Philosophy, Vol 1: Founding Giants (Princeton 2014), Analytic Philosophy in America, and other Historical and Contemporary Essays (Princeton 2014), What is Meaning? (Princeton 2010), Philosophy of Language (Princeton 2010), Collected Essays, Volumes 1 and 2, (Princeton, 2009), Reference and Description (Princeton, 2005), Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, Volumes 1 and 2 (Princeton 2003), Beyond Rigidity (Oxford University Press 2002), and Understanding Truth (Oxford 1999).  I am also co-author, with Jeff King and Jeff Speaks, of New Thinking about Propositions (Oxford 2014), and co-author, with David Perlmutter, of Syntactic Argumentation and the Structure of English, (University of California Press, 1979).  I am co-editor, with Andre Marmor, of Philosophical Foundations of Language in the Law, (Oxford 2012), and co-editor, with Nathan Salmon, of Propositions and Attitudes, (Oxford 1988).

My most recent book, The World Philosophy Made, was published by Princeton University Press in November 2019.