Louis Doulas

About

I’m currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Philosophy at the University of California, Irvine.

Before moving out west, I spent a number of years out east. In Boston, I did my MA in Philosophy at Brandeis University; in New York (before finding my way to philosophy) I worked as an editor and wrote about art influenced by the internet. And before all that, I received a BFA in Studio Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

My research aims to build a more accurate, contextually sensitive, and inclusive history of 19th–20th century analytic philosophy. I also have interests in contemporary epistemology, metaphysics, and language. Overall, my work is driven by a desire to understand the relationship between our ordinary beliefs and the demands and doubts that philosophy is thought to impose on them.

Publications

Book

1. The Philosophy of Susan Stebbing
   Under contract with Oxford University Press (co-edited with Annalisa Coliva)

   This is the first volume to be dedicated exclusively to the philosophy of Susan Stebbing (1885–1943). Through fourteen, previously unpublished essays, this book traces and explores the depth and breadth of Stebbing’s philosophical contributions across a diverse range of issues in analytic philosophy—from logic and science, to public philosophy and politics—and reinforces the importance of Stebbing’s place in that history as well as the saliency of her ideas to issues still under dispute today.

Articles

2. A Puzzle About Moorean Metaphysics
   Philosophical Studies (2021) 178: 493–513
3. Against Philosophical Proofs Against Common Sense
   Analysis (2021) 81: 207–215 (with Evan Welchance)
4. Philosophical Progress, Skepticism, and Disagreement
   The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Disagreement (2022) (with Annalisa Coliva)

5. What Philosophical Disagreement and Philosophical Skepticism Hinge On
   Synthese (2022) 200: 1–14 (with Annalisa Coliva)

In Progress

1. Proof in Parts: Understanding Moore’s Elusive Proof

   Despite the attention Moore’s “Proof of an External World” (1939) has received, there remain a host of interpretive puzzles that have gone either unresolved or unaddressed. In this paper, I offer an unified interpretation of “Proof” that resolves these puzzles.

2. What Moore’s Hands Mean

   G.E Moore’s “Proof of an External World” (1939) notoriously invokes two hands when one would have supposedly done the trick. This curious, conspicuous, artifact of Moore’s proof has, surprisingly, gone unexamined. In this paper, I provide compelling textual evidence that explains what Moore’s two hands mean and use this evidence to clarify an important, but somewhat elusive, aspect of Moore’s philosophy: Moore’s views on the relationship between logic and language.

3. Proof and Circularity Reconsidered

   It’s common to attribute the failure of Moore’s proof to its alleged epistemic circularity, that the proof suffers from “transmission failure” (Wright 2004, 2007). It’s also common to assume that Moore was oblivious to such worries. I argue that this is false. This leads to a puzzle of sorts: if Moore correctly anticipated such worries and didn’t think they were pressing, why do so many think that Moore’s proof is circular? What was Moore missing? Or, what are his critics missing? Answers to these questions promise to shed light on the nature of Moore’s (in)famous proof.

4. Making Sense of Moore and Stebbing on Common Sense

   Moore is known for championing a “common sense” view of the world. But his appeals to common sense can seem dubious—what exactly is common sense anyway? The aim of this paper is to demystify these appeals to common sense and clarify Moore’s overall common sense picture. I start with Susan Stebbing—a close colleague of Moore’s whose contributions have been overlooked in the literature—and use her conception of common sense to sharpen and develop Moore’s own.

Other Projects

5. Questions with and without Method: Moore, Carnap, Wittgenstein, and Quine

   This paper brings together four influential figures of analytic philosophy and examines their status as “anti-philosophers.” By “anti-philosopher,” I mean that all four philosophers were keen on circumscribing the limits and scope of what the philosophical method, and philosophy more generally, could achieve. All three, however, did this in interestingly different but related ways. To situate my discussion, I focus on the question concerning the external world and examine how each philosopher understood this question (as well as related questions) and then draw out some of the anti-philosophical commitments that unite them.

6. A paper on Susan Stebbing and Ordinary Language Philosophy

Teaching

I also teach.

As primary instructor, I taught Puzzles and Paradoxes at UC Irvine and an MTEL Prep course at Brandeis University.

I’ve served as a graduate student instructor for various courses too (mostly in philosophy, but also in art history and legal studies) at UC Irvine, Brandeis, and Harvard. Through TH!NK, I’ve taught philosophy to fifth-graders.