Peter Caws

Title — University Professor of Philosophy
Professor of Human Sciences

Office — Gelman 709F
Office Hours: Fridays 11:00-12:00 and by appointment

Phone — 202-994-8685

E-mail — pcaws@gwu.edu

Areas of Expertise —

philosophy of the sciences (natural and human); continental philosophy; moral and political philosophy.

Education

Ph.D., Yale

Publications

Books (author):

The Philosophy of Science, A Systematic Account (Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1965)

Science and the Theory of Value (New York: Random House, 1967)

Sartre (The Arguments of the Philosophers) (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979, paperback edition with additional material 1984)

Structuralism: The Art of the Intelligible (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1988, paperback 1990); 2nd edition [subtitle A Philosophy for the Human Sciences] Buffalo: Humanity Books, an imprint of Prometheus Publishers, 1997)

Yorick's World: Science and the Knowing Subject (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993)

The Capital Connection: Business, Science, and Government (New York: Baruch College, 1993)

Ethics from Experience (Boston: Jones and Bartlett [now Wadsworth], 1996)

Books (editor):

Two Centuries of Philosophy in America (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980)

The Causes of Quarrel: Essays on Peace, War, and Thomas Hobbes (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989)

Religious Upbringing and the Costs of Freedom: Personal and Philosophical Essays (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2010), co-edited with Stefani Jones

Selected recent chapters and articles (lifetime total 150+):

"Sartrean Structuralism?" in Howells, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Sartre (1992)

"Where the Argument Led," in Karnos and Shoemaker, eds., Falling in Love with Wisdom: American Philosophers Talk About Their Calling (1993)

"Subjectivity, Self-Identity, and Self-Description," in Sadler, ed., Philosophical Perspectives on Psychiatric Diagnostic Classification (1994)

"Identity: Cultural, Transcultural, Multicultural," in Goldberg, ed., Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader (1994)

"Minimal Consequentialism," Philosophy (1995)

"Sophistry, Rhetoric and the Postmodern Condition," Symploke (1997)

"Moral Certainty in Tolstoy," Philosophy and Literature (2000)

"The Unconscious is Structured Like a City: Freud, Lacan, and the project of the Human Sciences," Janus Head (2000)

"Natural and Intentional Structures of Sexuality," Bulletin de la Société Américaine de Philosophie de Langue Française (2003)

"Psychoanalysis as the Idiosyncratic Science of the Individual Subject," Psychoanalytical Psychology (2003)

"Arresting Images," catalogue essay for photography show curated jointly with Dr. Nancy Breslin, Luther W. Brady Gallery, the George Washington University (November 2003 - January 2004)

"The Distributive Structure of the Social Group," Journal of Social Philosophy (2005)

"To Hell and Back: Sartre on (and in) Analysis with Freud," in van den Hoven and Leak, eds., Sartre Today: A Centenary Celebration (2005)

"First and Second Order Unification in the Social and Human Sciences," Graduate Journal of Social Science (2005)

"Terror: from the Armada to al-Qaeda," in Deborah Staines, ed., Interrogating the War on Terror (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007)

Community and Society on a Transnational Scale: On the Possibility of a Global Ethics," in Commers, Vandekerckhove and Verlinden, eds., Ethics in an Era of Globalization (London: Ashgate,2008)

"Ontologies and Evolutions," Philosophical Forum (2008)

"The Irrelevance of Chronological Age" (in English), with Julia Glahn, in Blatterer and Glahn, eds., Times of Our Lives (Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2009)

Pragmatic Immortality and the Insignificance of My Own Death," in Cooley and Steffen, eds., Re-Imagining Dying and Death (Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2009)

"What's Alive in Living Bodes, What's Dead in Dead Ones?," in Groß, Glahn and Tag, eds., Die Leiche als Memento mori, Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven auf das Verhältnis von Tod und totem Körper (Frankfurt/New York: Campus Verlag, 2010)

"Structuralism," in Encyclopedia of Political Theory (London: Sage, 2010)

De irrelevantie van de chronologische leeftijd" (in Dutch), with Julia Glahn, in Dohmen and Baars, eds., De kunst van het ouder worden: De grote filosofen over ouderdom (Amsterdam: Ambo, 2010)