Stuart Brock

Qualifications

• BA Monash
• MA ANU
• MA, PhD Princeton

Profile

Stuart Brock is a Professor in the Philosophy programme and is currently the Vice-Provost (Academic) at Victoria University of Wellington. He has previously served as Head of the Philosophy programme, Deputy Head of the School of History, Philosophy, Political Science and International Relations, and Associate Dean (Students, Postgraduate Research, and Academic Programmes) in the Wellington Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. He has taught courses in critical thinking, epistemology, metaphysics, and the philosophy of literature. He has published important works on fiction and metaphysics. He received his PhD from Princeton University in 2002 and previously taught at Western Washington University in the United States.

Research areas

Metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of literature, and philosophy of the emotions.

Selected publications

Books

Realism and Antirealism (co-authored with Edwin Mares) Acumen (2007)

Journal articles

'The Phenomenological Objection to Fictionalism', Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (forthcoming).

'The Puzzle of Imaginative Failure', Philosophical Quarterly, 62 (2012) pp. 443-463.

'The Creationist Fiction: The Case against Creationism about Fictional Characters', Philosophical Review, 119 (2010) pp. 337-364.

'Fictions, Feelings, and Emotions', Philosophical Studies, 132 (2007) pp. 211-242.

'World-Indexed Descriptivism and the Spurious Problem of Referring Names', Philosophical Analysis, (2006) pp. 197-204.

'The Ubiquitous Problem of Empty Names', Journal of Philosophy, 101 (2004).

'Fictionalism About Fictional Characters', Nous, 36 (2002).

Book chapters

'A Puzzle About Fictional Characters', (co-authored with Cei Maslen and Justin Ngai) From Fictionalism to Realism: Fictional and Other Social Entities, Carola Barbero, Maurizio Ferraris, and Alberto Voltolini (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2013).