Peter Ludlow

Ludlow has taught as a professor of philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, the University of Michigan, the University of Toronto and Northwestern University, where he was the John Evans Professor in Moral and Intellectual Philosophy. In May 2015, Ludlow resigned his position at Northwestern after a university disciplinary body found that "he had engaged in sexual harassment involving two students."

Ludlow resigned from his position at Northwestern in November 2015 after a university disciplinary body found that he sexually assaulted two students. Ludlow denied any wrongdoing and said the relationship was consensual. Fellow Northwestern professor Laura Kipnis defended him, stating that female university students should be responsible for their own decisions about whether to date a professor, and argued that "you have to feel a little sorry these days for professors married to their former students. They used to be respectable citizens [...] and now they’re abusers of power." In 2017 Laura Kipnis published the book Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus, discussing the Ludlow case in detail; one of the students who brought the Title IX complaint against Ludlow has sued Kipnis for defamation based on the description in the book. In March 2018, the district court denied the defendants' motion to dismiss the student's lawsuit.

Ludlow's earliest work in semantics was an attempt to combine work in the theory of meaning with contemporary work in generative linguistics, but using resources that are more parsimonious than those typically used in semantic theory—for example without using the higher-order functions and intensional objects deployed in Montague grammar. The resources were largely limited to primitives like truth and reference to individuals.

His subsequent work has explored ways of formalizing alternative approaches to semantic theory—including the possibility of formalizing a Wittgensteinian use theory or expressivist semantics for natural language, which is to say a theory in which the building blocks of a semantic theory are expressions of attitudes rather than primitives like truth and reference.

Recent work in epistemology has pushed back against skepticism by arguing that knowledge attributions are context sensitive—our standards of knowledge vary from context to context. So, while in a philosophy class I may not know I have hands, in other contexts (for example, chatting in a bar) I do. Ludlow initially argued that there were implicit argument positions for standards of knowledge. In response to criticism from Jason Stanley in his book "Knowledge and Practical Interests", Ludlow has advanced a doctrine that he calls "Cheap Contextualism". The idea is that on the dynamic lexicon view, shifts in word meaning are ubiquitous, and the meaning of the term "know" is not an exception. Contextualism in epistemology is just a consequence of these garden variety shifts in meaning.

Ludlow has written a series of papers on the logical form of determiners (words like "all", "some", and "no") and has pursued the idea that their most interesting properties can be given purely formal or syntactic accounts. The work borrows from one of the central ideas of medieval logic—the hypothesis that all the key logical inferences can be reduced down to just two basic inferences that are sensitive to whether the syntactic environment was dictum de omni or dictum de nullo—classical notions that are basically equivalent to the contemporary notions of upward and downward entailing environments. To explain, in an upward entailing (de omni) environment a superset can be substituted for any set. In a downward entailing environment a subset may be substituted for a set. Ludlow revives the medieval project by combining it with the descriptive tools of contemporary Chomskyan linguistics and recent technical work in formal logic.

The Herald has been written about in Wired and the Columbia Journalism Review. Ludlow (in the voice of Urizenus Sklar) is currently a contributing editor, while the avatar Pixeleen Mistral, revealed by Ludlow in 2010 to be Internet pioneer Mark P. McCahill, is the newspaper's managing editor.

Ludlow and Mark Wallace wrote a book about The Herald and its exploits called The Second Life Herald: the Virtual Tabloid that Witnessed the Dawn of the Metaverse (MIT Press, 2007). The book received the American Association of Publishers, Professional/Scholarly Publishing award for "Best Book in Media and Cultural Studies, 2007", was named a Choice "Outstanding Academic Title, 2008", and Library Journal honored it as a "Top Sci-Tech Book, 2007," (they ranked it one of top 39 science books of 2007 and top book in category of Computer Science).

In a controversy, reported in the New York Times and elsewhere (including law journals), Ludlow was kicked out of The Sims Online after some editorials criticized Electronic Arts Corporation for their failures at managing and policing the gamespace. The newspaper subsequently migrated to another virtual world, Second Life, in June 2004.

Ludlow founded The Alphaville Herald on October 23, 2003. It was the unofficial newspaper for the Alphaville server of The Sims Online, where Ludlow used the avatar Urizenus Sklar. Its stories uncovered in-game scams and cyber-prostitution, and highlighted Electronic Arts' indifference to the social problems in their game.

Ludlow has been a highly prominent, and sometimes controversial, figure in several virtual worlds communities, especially The Sims Online and Second Life, since the early 2000s. He has been accused by Scott Jennings and Catherine Fitzpatrick of giving griefers "his blessing" through his newspaper, The Alphaville Herald.

He has been a visiting fellow at the Ca' Foscari University of Venice in 1993, 1995 and 1997–1998, when he held a Fulbright distinguished chair. He has also been a visiting fellow at King's College London in 1997 and a visiting professor at the Rutgers University Center for Cognitive Science in 2012, where he taught a course on hacktivism. He has also held visiting positions at several other universities in the United States and Europe.

From 1987 to 2002 he worked at the State University of New York at Stony Brook Department of Philosophy as an assistant professor and from 1994 as an associate professor. He was a professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan from 2002 to 2007, a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto from 2007 to 2008 and a professor of philosophy at the Northwestern University from 2008 to 2015. From 2011 he was also John Evans Professor in Moral and Intellectual Philosophy at Northwestern University.

Ludlow received his B.A. in 1979 from Bethel College. He received his PhD in philosophy from Columbia University in 1985 under the direction of Charles Parsons, but also studied with Noam Chomsky and James Higginbotham at MIT. He worked for a year on projects related to natural language processing as an engineer at Honeywell from 1985 to 1986.

Peter Ludlow (/ˈ l ʌ d l oʊ / ; born January 16, 1957), who also writes under the pseudonym Urizenus Sklar, is an American philosopher of language. He is noted for interdisciplinary work on the interface of linguistics and philosophy—in particular on the philosophical foundations of Noam Chomsky's theory of generative linguistics and on the foundations of the theory of meaning in linguistic semantics. He has worked on the application of analytic philosophy of language to topics in epistemology, metaphysics, and logic, among other areas.