Michael P. Wolf is Professor of Philosophy at Washington and Jefferson College.  This is what he would look like if he were a small black cat.

My recent work has been primarily in the philosophy of language, particularly theories of reference and rigid designation.  Most of it addresses recent debates on meaning in the analytical tradition, with great heaping doses of pragmatism.  I have also written articles on epistemology and objectivity, as well as the philosophy of humor.  I am the co-editor of The Self-Correcting Enterprise (2006) with Mark Lance, a collection of essays on the philosophy of Wilfrid Sellars.  Most recently, I co-wrote The Normative and the Natural (Palgrave, 2016) with Jeremy Koons.

I graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 1993 and Georgetown in 1999. I then taught at a small college in Michigan for three years and in California for five years before taking my current job much closer to home. I used to play and write a lot of music, but not so much of late. When I grow up, I want to be John Coltrane, but I won’t be. So, I’m just going to try to be Mike Watt instead.

Why the name of the blog?

I was once waiting for a load to finish in a coin-op laundromat in Arlington, Virginia, when a woman approached me.  Feeling I was due for social sanction, she yelled, “MEN DON’T HAVE LONG HAIR!!!”

To which I replied, “I appear to be a counterexample.”

I frequently do.