GRAHAM ODDIE (PhD, London, 1979) began studying philosophy at the University of Otago (New Zealand). While Oddie was an undergraduate at Otago, Sir Karl Popper came for a year as a Visiting Professor. The Otago faculty were all instructed by the Chair to discuss Popper's ideas in the weekly colloquium. When it came to his turn, Pavel Tichy proved that Popper's theory of truthlikeness had the following devastating consequence: that no false proposition could be closer to the truth than any other. This was a total disaster for Popper's account of scientific progress (as he acknowledged at the end of the presentation) but for Oddie it came as something of a revelation: that in philosophy you could actually prove interesting stuff. This made a life in philosophy seem rather attractive. Soon after he began working with Tichy on a new idea for truthlikeness, and wrote a PhD on truthlikeness and content at the London School of Economics (University of London). This morphed into the first book-length treatment on the topic: Likeness to Truth (Reidel, 1986). Oddie returned to Otago as a Lecturer, moving a few years later be Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Massey University, and thence to CU Boulder in 1994. He served as Chair of the Philosophy Department for several years, and is currently doing a stint as Associate Dean for Humanities and the Arts. He is fully involved in the Department, however, and is currently principal advisor for two PhD students working in ethics and metaethics.

Areas of Interest: Metaphysics, Value Theory, Metaethics, Applied Ethics, Philosophy of Science, Philosophical Logic.

Current Research: current research is focused on the intersection of metaphysics and value theory with odd forays into philosophy of science and philosophical logic.

For more information, see Professor Oddie's CV.

• Value Reality and Desire (Oxford University Press, 2005). Chapter 1 can be found here.
• "Experiences of Value," in Charles Pigden (ed.), Hume, Motivation and Virtue (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2008).
• "The Fictionalist's Attitude Problem," (with Dan Demetriou) Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 10 (2007): 485-498.
• "Truthlikeness," in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (May, 2007).
• "A Refutation of Peircian Idealism," in Colin Cheyne (ed.), Rationality and Reality: Conversations with Alan Musgrave (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2006), 255-262.
• "Recombinant Values," Philosophical Studies 106 (2001): 259-292.
• "Scrumptious Functions," Grazer Philosophische Studien 62 (2001): 137-56.
• "Hume, the Bad Paradox, and Value Realism," Philo 4 (2001): 109-22.
• "Axiological Atomism," Australian Journal of Philosophy 79 (2001): 313-332.
• "Permanent Possibilities of Sensation," Philosophical Studies 98 (2000): 345-59.
• "Moral realism, moral relativism and moral rules (a compatibility argument)," Synthese 117 (1999): 251-274.
• "Conditionalization, cogency and cognitive value," British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 48 (1997): 533-41.
• "Killing and Letting-Die: from Bare Differences to Clear Differences," Philosophical Studies 88 (1997): 267-87.