Contact details
2.N.10, second floor, north wing, Arts Building, 95 Albany Street
Tel +64 3 471 6413
Email stuart.brock@otago.ac.nz
Academic qualifications
2002: PhD Princeton
1996: MA Princeton
1995: MA ANU (1995)
1993 BA(Hons) Monash
Research interests
Stuart is a professor in the philosophy programme at the University of Otago. His research interests are in the areas of metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of literature, and philosophy of the emotions. Much of his work lies at the intersection of these topics, with a strong focus on fictionalism. In particular, he is interested in how our engagement with fiction helps us understand other domains and solve long-standing problems in philosophy. He is currently working on a monograph on religious fictionalism.
Stuart received his PhD from Princeton University in 2002 and previously held academic positions at Victoria University of Wellington, Western Washington University and Princeton University. His work has been supported by a Marsden Grant administered by the Royal Society Te Apārangi.
Publications
Books
- Realism and Antirealism. Co-authored with Edwin Mares, Acumen/Routledge, 2007.
- A Critical Introduction to Fictionalism. Co-authored with Fred Kroon and Jonathan McKeown-Green, Bloomsbury, 2018.
Edited books
- Fictional Objects. Co-edited with Anthony Everett, Oxford University Press, 2015.
- Moral and Religious Fictionalism. Co-edited with Richard Joyce, Oxford University Press, 2023.
Book chapters
- ‘A Puzzle About Fictional Characters,’ (co-authored with Cei Maslen and Justin Ngai) In From Fictionalism to Realism: Fictional and Other Social Entities, Carola Barbero, Maurizio Ferraris, and Alberto Voltolini (eds), Cambridge Scholars Publishing (2013) 63-86.
- Introduction, Fictional Objects, Stuart Brock and Anthony Everett (ed), Oxford University Press (2015) 1-23.
- ‘Fictionalism, Fictional Characters, and Fictionalist Inference,’ In Fictional Objects, Stuart Brock and Anthony Everett (ed), Oxford University Press (2015) 230-254.
- ‘Is Philosophy Progressing Fast Enough?’ In Philosophy’s Future: The Problem of Philosophical Progress, Damien Broderick and Russell Blackford (eds) Wiley Blackwell (2017) 119-131.
- ‘Religious Fictionalism and Pascal’s Wager,’ In New Essays on Philosophical Fictionalism, Fred Kroon and Bradley Armour-Garb (eds) Oxford University Press (forthcoming 2019)
- ‘The Puzzle of Fictional Morality’ In Art, Representation and Make-Believe: Essays on the Philosophy of Kendall L. Walton, Sonia Sedivy (ed), Routledge (2021).
- ‘Moral Fictionalism and the Problem of Imaginative Barriers’, In Religious and Moral Fictionalism, Stuart Brock and Richard Joyce (eds), Oxford University Press (2023).
Journal articles
- ‘Modal Fictionalism: A Response to Rosen’. Mind, 102 (1993) 147-150. [Published as a student]
- ‘Fictionalism About Fictional Characters’. Noûs, 36 (2002) 1-21.
- ‘The Ubiquitous Problem of Empty Names’. Journal of Philosophy, (2004) 277-298.
- ‘World-Indexed Descriptivism and the Spurious Problem of Referring Names’. Philosophical Analysis, (2006) 197-204.
- ‘Fiction, Feelings, and the Emotions’. Philosophical Studies, 132 (2007) 211-242.
- ‘The Creationist Fiction: The Case against Creationism about Fictional Characters’. Philosophical Review, 119 (2010) 337-364.
- ‘The Puzzle of Imaginative Failure’. Philosophical Quarterly, 62 (2012) 443-463.
- ‘The Phenomenological Objection to Fictionalism’. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 88 (2014) 574-592.
- ‘Reductionism, Fictionalism, and the Objects of Thought’. Philosophical Analysis, 33 (2015) 89-103.
- ‘Fictionalism about Fictional Characters Revisited’. Res Philosophica, 93 (2016) 377-403.
- ‘The Prospects for If-Thenism’. Australasian Philosophical Review, (2017) 1-3.
- A Recalcitrant Problem for Abstract Creationism. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 76 (2018) 93-98.
- ‘The Paradox Paradox.’ Co-authored with Joshua Glasgow, Synthese, 200 (2022) 1-7.
Teaching
As well as teaching in other papers, Stuart regularly teaches in: