Kirk Ludwig

I work on foundational issues in the philosophy of language (esp. logical form and semantics), the philosophy of mind and action, epistemology, and metaphysics, though my interests extend to every area of philosophical inquiry. I taught at the University of Florida from 1990 to 2010 and when I joined the philosophy department and cognitive science program at Indiana University, Bloomington, where I am the Ruth N. Halls Professor.

I am the editor of the volume on Donald Davidson (2003) in the Cambridge Contemporary Philosophy in Focus series, and coauthor with Ernie Lepore (Rutgers) of Donald Davidson: Meaning, Truth, Language and Reality (OUP 2005) and Donald Davidson's Truth-theoretic Semantics (OUP 2007). I am co-editor with Ernie Lepore of A Companion to Davidson (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013). I am author of From Individual to Plural Agency: Collective Action I (OUP 2016), and From Plural to Institutional Agency (OUP 2017). I am co-editor with Marija Jankovic on The Routledge Handbook of Collective Intentionality (2018).

Recent publications include “Psychologism: From Atomism to Externalism” (in The Oxford Handbook of Social Ontology, 2025), “Responsibility Magnets and Shelters in Institutional Action” (in Collective Responsibility: Perspectives from political philosophy and social ontology, Springer, 2024), “Collective Obligations and the Moral Hi-Lo Game” (in Value, Morality, and Social Reality, Lund University Press, 2023) “Conventions and Status Functions,” with Marija Jankovic, (The Journal of Philosophy, 2022), “Let Me Go and Try” (Philosophical Explorations, 2021), "What are Group Speech Acts?" (Language and Communication, 2020), "The Social Construction of Legal Norms" (in Social Ontology, Normatively and Law, De Gruyter 2020), "From Individual to Collective Responsibility" (The Routledge Handbook of Collective Responsibility, 2020), "Unconscious Inference Theories of Cognitive Achievement" (in Inference and Consciousness, 2020), "Proxy Assertion" (in The Oxford Handbook of Assertion, 2020).

My current project is an Introduction to Collective Intentionality in Action, Thought, and Society with Marija Jankovic.