Dagfinn Føllesdal

Dagfinn Føllesdal (born 22 June 1932) is the Clarence Irving Lewis Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Stanford University, and professor emeritus at the University of Oslo.

Føllesdal was born in Askim. After earning his bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Oslo, he attended Harvard University and earned his Ph.D. in 1961 under Willard Van Orman Quine. He taught at Harvard University from 1961 to 1964, and began teaching at Stanford University in 1968.

Føllesdal is a member of the Norwegian Academy for Language and Literature, the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He resides at Tanum. He is a practicing Roman Catholic. He regularly participates in the sport of Orienteering.

Føllesdal has written extensively on topics relating to the philosophy of language, phenomenology, existentialism, and hermeneutics. He was a pupil of Quine and is among the leading experts on the indeterminacy of translation.

• Referential Opacity and Modal logic. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1966
• "Quine on Modality." Synthese (December 1968), 19(1-2):147-157.
• "Husserl's Notion of Noema." Journal of Philosophy (October 1969), 66(20):680-687.
• "Indeterminacy of Translation and Under-Determination of the Theory of Nature." Dialectica (1973), 27:289-301.
• "Essentialism and Reference." In Lewis Hahn, ed., The Philosophy of W. V. Quine, pp. 97–115. La Salle: Open Court, 1986.
• "Indeterminacy and Mental States." In Perspectives on Quine. Oxford & Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1990.
• "In What Sense Is Language Public?" In Paolo Leonardi, ed., On Quine: New Essays. New York & Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
• "Absorbed Coping, Husserl and Heidegger." In Mark A. Wrathall and Jeff Malpas, eds., Heidegger, Authenticity, and Modernity: Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus, Volume 1, pp. 251–257. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000.