Sydney Shoemaker

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American philosopher (1931–2022)

title: "Sydney Shoemaker" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["1931-births", "2022-deaths", "20th-century-american-male-writers", "20th-century-american-philosophers", "20th-century-american-essayists", "21st-century-american-male-writers", "21st-century-american-philosophers", "21st-century-american-essayists", "action-theorists", "american-male-essayists", "american-male-non-fiction-writers", "american-philosophy-academics", "analytic-philosophers", "american-consciousness-researchers-and-theorists", "cornell-university-alumni", "cornell-university-faculty", "american-epistemologists", "american-metaphysicians", "american-metaphysics-writers", "ontologists", "philosophers-from-idaho", "american-philosophers-of-mind", "american-philosophers-of-science", "reed-college-alumni", "writers-from-boise,-idaho", "corresponding-fellows-of-the-british-academy"] description: "American philosopher (1931–2022)" topic_path: "philosophy" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Shoemaker" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0

::summary American philosopher (1931–2022) ::

::data[format=table title="Infobox academic"]

Field	Value
region	Western philosophy
era	20th-century philosophy
image	Philosopher_Sydney_Shoemaker_(1951-2022)_in_1973.jpg
name	Sydney S. Shoemaker
birth_date	September 29, 1931
birth_place	Boise, Idaho, U.S.
death_date
death_place	Ithaca, New York, U.S.
alma_mater	Reed College
Cornell University (Ph.D., 1958)
thesis_title	Self-Knowledge and Self-Identity
thesis_url	https://www.proquest.com/docview/301937555
thesis_year	1958
school_tradition	Analytic philosophy
Representationalism
workplaces	Cornell University
main_interests	Philosophy of mind, metaphysics
notable_ideas	Immunity to error through misidentification
Quasi-memory
doctoral_advisor	Norman Malcolm
::

Sydney Sharpless Shoemaker (September 29, 1931 – September 3, 2022) was an American philosopher. He was the Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy at Cornell University and is well known for his contributions to philosophy of mind and metaphysics.

Education and career

Shoemaker graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from Reed College and earned his Doctor of Philosophy from Cornell University in 1958 under the supervision of Norman Malcolm. He taught philosophy at Ohio State University from 1957 to 1960 then, in 1961, returned to Cornell as a faculty member of the philosophy department. In 1978 he was appointed the Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy, a position he held until his retirement, as professor emeritus of Philosophy.

Among his students at Cornell were Richard Moran and Susanna Siegel.

In 1971, he delivered the John Locke Lectures at Oxford University.

Shoemaker died on September 3, 2022, at the age of 90. He was buried in Greensprings Natural Cemetery Preserve in Newfield.

Philosophical work

Shoemaker worked primarily in the philosophy of mind and metaphysics, and published many classic papers in both of these areas (as well as their overlap). In "Functionalism and Qualia" (1975), for example, he argued that functionalism about mental states can account for the qualitative character (or 'raw feel') of mental states. In "Self-Reference and Self-Awareness" (1968), he argued that the phenomenon of absolute 'immunity to error through misidentification' is what distinguishes self-attributions of mental states (such as "I see a canary") from self-attributions of physical states (such as "I weigh 200 pounds").

In metaphysics, he defended the view that laws are metaphysically necessary, a position that follows from his view of properties as clusters of conditional causal powers. He also applied his view of properties to the problem of mental causation. He also distinguished contributions to the literature on self-knowledge and personal identity, where he defended a Lockean psychological continuity theory in his influential paper "Persons and their Pasts". In his later work on the content of perception he has argued for a distinctive version of representationalism.

Selected publications

Books

Self-Knowledge and Self-Identity (1963).
Personal Identity (co-authored with Richard Swinburne) (1984).
Identity, Cause and Mind: Philosophical Essays (1984).
The First-Person Perspective, and other Essays (1996).
Physical Realization (2007).

Articles

1970, "Persons and their Pasts", American Philosophical Quarterly, pp. 269–285.
1988, "On Knowing One's Own Mind", Philosophical Perspectives, pp. 183–209.

References

"History of the Sage School {{!}} Sage School of Philosophy".
Larry Bernard (May 6, 1996), [https://news.cornell.edu/stories/1996/05/three-cornell-faculty-members-are-elected-american-academy-arts-and-sciences "Three Cornell faculty members are elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences"], ''[[Cornell Chronicle]].''
"History of the Sage School {{!}} Sage School of Philosophy Cornell Arts & Sciences".
Greco, John. (2005). "[[The Dictionary of Modern American Philosophers]]".
"Keeping Sartre, and other passions".
(2000). "Doctoral Dissertations 1999–2000". [[The Review of Metaphysics]].
(13 September 2022). "Sydney Shoemaker".
Shoemaker, Sydney. (1970). "Persons and Their Pasts". [[American Philosophical Quarterly]].
(2007). "Shoemaker on Phenomenal Content". Philosophical Studies.
Tye, Michael. (2000). "Shoemaker's The First-Person Perspective and Other Essays". [[Philosophy and Phenomenological Research]].

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