I am a philosopher at the University of Guelph, in the very pleasant city of Guelph, Ontario, Canada. (It’s pronounced “gwelf.”) My academic training was at the University of Toronto and the University of Pittsburgh where I completed my PhD under the direction of Robert Brandom.
Fall 2019
Winter 2019
In addition to normal departmental service responsibilities I am one of the (17) Executive Editors of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy.
I work mostly in philosophy of language and epistemology. Currently I’m working (in collaboration with Juhani Yli-Vakkuri) on the semantics and pragmatics of distributed utterances: utterances that are (more than usually) spread out in time or space, or made partly by one speaker and partly by another. (The simplest example is a slow utterance of “Now I’m starting my sentence, and now I’m finishing it.”) I am also interested in the theory of concept possession, in particular the challenges to it posed by the phenomena first highlighted in Benson Mates’s famous examples of expressions multiply embedded within the scopes of attitude verbs.
Recent publications:
Distributed utterances [penultimate version]. Forthcoming in The Architecture of Context and Context-sensitivity, edited by Tadeusz Ciecierski and Paweł Grabarczy. Dordrecht: Springer.
Kinds of monsters and kinds of compositionality. Analysis 78 (2018): 657–66.
Russellianism unencumbered. Philosophical Studies 174 (2017): 2819–43.
Scare-quoting and incorporation. In The Semantics and Pragmatics of Quotation, edited by Paul Saka and Michael Johnson, 3–34. Dordrecht: Springer, 2017.
Full list of publications, with abstracts
Email: mmcculla@uoguelph.ca
Mail: Dept of Philosophy, University of Guelph, Guelph, ON Canada N1G 2W1
Offfice: 332 MacKinnon Building. (How to find the Department of Philosophy)
Office hours: None for 2018–2019.