Hans Kamp (philosophy of language, formal semantics, formal philosophy), emeritus at the University of Stuttgart, has accepted a half-time appointment in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, where he taught full-time during part of the 1980s before his move to Stuttgart. With Kamp, David Beaver in Linguistics, and Joshua Dever, A.P. Martinich, Mark Sainsbury, David Sosa, and (also part-time) Nicholas Asher, among others, in Philosophy, Texas must now have one of the five or six strongest programs in the U.S. for work at the intersection of philosophy of language and linguistics (NYU, Rutgers, UCLA, and USC may still dominate, but that would be it).
As a point of personal privilege, I must note that the flipside, alas, of developing excellence in this particular area (philosophy of language and linguistics) has been that it has come at the cost of much less breadth and depth in most other areas of philosophy, a source of some frustration for me personally and some of my former colleagues not interested in these areas. 'Tis a shame for a department so large to have become so narrow.
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