The Philosopher

John MacFarlane

The synopsis

John MacFarlane is an American professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, with research interests spanning logic, metaphysics, and language. He has made influential contributions to truth-value theory and inferential semantics. In recognition of his academic achievements, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2015. Beyond his academic pursuits, MacFarlane is also a notable figure in the open-source community. He is the creator of the widely used Pandoc document converter and has contributed to various Markdown parsers and verifiers. He was part of the group that initiated the CommonMark standardization effort, aiming to create a more consistent and robust specification for Markdown. His academic work delves into complex areas such as the normativity of logic, linguistic relativism, and assessment sensitivity, exploring how meaning and truth can vary depending on context and perspective.

The works