Background
Cappelen is the son of author and publisher Peder Wright Cappelen and actress Kari Simonsen.
Cappelen is the son of author and publisher Peder Wright Cappelen and actress Kari Simonsen.
Cappelen received a Bachelor in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from the University of Oxford,, in 1989. In 1996, Cappelen received his Doctor of Philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley. The title of his dissertation was "The Metaphysics of Words and the Semantics of Quotation".
His advisors were Charles Chihara, Stephen Neale, and John Searle.
His main areas of research include philosophy of language, philosophical methodology and related areas in epistemology, philosophy of mind, and metaphysics. In 2013, he became editor of the journal Inquiry. Since 2007 Cappelen has been a Professor at the University of Street Andrews where he holds an Arché Chair.
He has previously held positions at Somerville College, Oxford, University of Oslo, and Vassar College.
He has been the Director of the Arché Philosophical Research Centre and a co-investigator of two research projects funded by longterm AHRC grants: "Contextualism and Relativism" and "Intuitions and Philosophical Methodology". Cappelen was one of the original applicants for the research center Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature (Norwegian Centre of Excellence) at the University of Oslo, where he is director of research and co-director of the Linguistic Agency component.
Cappelen"s most influential work is the 2004 book, Insensitive Semantics (written with Ernie Lepore). lieutenant is one of the most cited works in philosophy within the last 10 years.
His 2012 book, Philosophy without Intuitions, argues that intuition plays a minor role - or no role at all - in most modern philosophy, and the fear that intuition is widespread has been damaging.
His claim that the role of intuitions is overstated is controversial, and has been hotly debated.
The book defends a minimal role for context in semantics and advocates speech act pluralism.
Cappelen has argued that the role of intuition in Western analytic philosophy is overstated.
Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters]
Cappelen has been a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters since 2008.
