Assistant Professor
(Starting from Fall 2025)
Ph.D., Princeton University
Areas of Interest: Philosophy of Logic, Metaethics, Logic, Philosophy of Language
Personal Homepage: https://philpeople.org/profiles/jack-woods
Email: tbd
Phone: tbd
Office: tbd
About
Jack Woods finished his PhD at Princeton University (under John Burgess and the belated Paul Benacerraf in 2013). He started his PhD at the University of Minnesota (under William Hanson and the belated Keith Gunderson), leaving with a MA for Princeton. Jack holds a BS from Northeastern University and multiple certificates in manual handling and fire safety. A Humboldt Foundation fellow and alumni and a former University Academic Fellow at Leeds, he has been invited to speak at many prestigious venues, including the Aristotelian Society and the Cambridge Moral Sciences Club. Bilkent University was his first professional academic home, where he worked for several years.
Jack has broad philosophical interests, though his dissertation work was in Logic and the Philosophy of Mathematics. He specializes in neglected areas of philosophy, such as the fragility of reasoning turned on itself, the nature of banal and commonplace moral mistakes, and resuscitating a shamelessly conventional picture of the world. He has published numerous prominent articles in Metaethics — both on the language of ethics and the nature of normativity; Epistemology; Logic and the Philosophy of Logic, and a bit of Normative Ethics. These have appeared in venues such as the Philosophical Review, Noûs, Ethics, and Oxford Studies in Metaethics and Normative Ethics.
The current main project is a book manuscript on convention and the nature of normativity, tentatively titled: This is How We Do It (with apologies to Montell Jordan). This manuscript has garnered interest from both Oxford and Cambridge University Presses – He anticipates finishing it during the next couple of years.
Outside of philosophy, Woods is deeply interested in music and the culture thereof – especially punk, house, and disco – art, and literature. He has published art criticism, curated exhibitions, and given talks on places where philosophy meets the real worlds, such as the metaphysics of tattoos, community in the rave community, and the place (and need for) existentialism in the contemporary world. He likes animals of all stripes and firmly rejects the idea that any are better than any other…except dogs and raccoons, which are clearly the best.
Sample publications
Woods, J., & Sagi, G. (Eds.) (2021). The Semantic Conception of Logic: Essays on Consequence, Invariance, and Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Woods, J. (forthcoming). Logical Abductivism. In Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Logic. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Woods, J. (2023). A Sketchy Logical Conventionalism. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 97(1), 29–46.
Woods, J. (2022). Carnal Knowledge: Epistemic Injustice and the Wisdom of Whores. In T. Sanders, K. McGarry, & P. Ryan (Eds.), Sex Work, Labour and Relations. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Baker, D., & Woods, J. (2021). Handling Rejection. Philosophical Studies, 180(1), 159–190.
Woods, J. (2021). Ordinary Wrongdoing. Oxford Studies in Normative, Ethics, 11, 155–176.
Maguire, B., & Woods, J. (2020). The Game of Belief. Philosophical Review, 129(2), 211–249.
Woods, J. (2019). The Self-Effacement Gambit. Res Philosophica, 96(2), 113–139.
Woods, J. (2019). Against Reflective Equilibrium for Logical Theorizing. Australasian Journal of Logic, 16(7), 319–341.
Boccuni, F., & Woods, J. (2019). Structuralist Neologicism. Philosophia Mathematica, 28(3), 296–316.
Woods, J. (2019). Logical Partisanhood. Philosophical Studies, 176(5), 1203–1224.
Woods, J. (2019). Footing the Cost (of Normative Subjectivism). In A. Kauppinen & J. Suikkanen (Eds.), Methodology and Moral Philosophy (pp. 166–190).
Woods, J. (2018). The Authority of Formality. Oxford Studies in Metaethics, 13, 207–229.
Woods, J. (2018). A Commitment-Theoretic Account of Moore’s Paradox. In K. Turner & L. Horn (Eds.), Pragmatics, Truth and Underspecification: Towards an Atlas of Meaning (pp. 323–348).
Woods, J. (2018). Emptying a Paradox of Ground. Journal of Philosophical Logic, 47(4), 631–648.
Woods, J. (2018). Intertranslatability, Theoretical Equivalence, and Perversion. Thought: A Journal of Philosophy, 7(1), 58–68.
Woods, J. (2018). Mathematics, Morality, and Self-Effacement. Noûs, 52(1), 47–68.
Woods, J., & Maguire, B. (2017). Model Theory, Hume’s Dictum, and the Priority of Ethical Theory. Ergo, 4(14), 419–440.
Woods, J. (2017). The Frege-Geach Problem. In T. McPherson & D. Plunkett (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Metaethics (pp. 226–277).
Woods, J. (2016). Characterizing Invariance. Ergo, 3(30), 778–807.
Woods, J. (2016). The Normative Force of Promising. Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, 6, 77–101.
Woods, J. (2016). Assertion, Denial, Content, and (Logical) Form. Synthese, 193(6), 1667–1680.
Woods, J. (2015). Expressivism Worth The Name: A Reply to Teemu Toppinen. Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, 1–6.
Baker, D., & Woods, J. (2015). How Expressivists Can and Should Explain Inconsistency. Ethics, 125(2), 391–424.
Woods, J. (2014). Logical Indefinites. Logique et Analyse, 57(227), 277–307.
Woods, J. (2014). Expressivism and Moore’s Paradox. Philosophers’ Imprint, 14(5), 1–12.
Woods, J. (2012). Failures of Categoricity and Compositionality for Intuitionistic Disjunction. Thought: A Journal of Philosophy, 1(4), 281–291.