This is not my official CV, so dont take it seriously. But then, again, didnt Wittgenstein say that we shouldnt expound on what we cannot speak about? I am not sure he wasnt cheating, but I cant help disagreeing with those who dislike that thought.
In short: I am not what I could have been, though I could have been what I am not. I dont live in Italy but I was not born in the USA (and not in this century). Im not dead either, thank goodness, at least not yet. And I am no longer unemployed.
My work has nothing to do with engineering or business administration (or with car racing, in case you didnt know the difference), but I dont mind that. It never occurred to me that philosophy might not be the right choice. On the other hand, no one ever told me philosophy doesnt pay well, so I shouldnt say I dont have regrets. Dont we all?
My first book (Holes, of which I was not the only author) was about nothing. Or maybe thats not quite true; it just was not about the usual sort of thing a materialist philosopher writes about. For holes are not material objects, hence their identity and persistence conditions are not easy to pin down. (Nor is it easy to account for their causal role, if any; dont forget Locke!) Yet theres no doughnut without a hole, so one cannot just ignore the issue. At least, we didnt think one can.
Not that my other books are concerned with more solid stuff. For instance, Parts and Places (also not by me alone) does not dismiss boundaries and empty receptacles, while Ontology and Words and Objects (currently not in English) consider what there isnt no less than what there is. Ditto for other, non-dissimilar editorial projects on Events, Temporal Parts, Fiat Objects, or Lesser Kinds, not to mention the incongruities of Time Travel or the impalpable world of Geography.
In logic, for a while I didnt do much except for worrying about truth-value gaps. Of course gluts arent less tricky, so I could not neglect them. But I cannot say that Im an expert and An Essay in Universal Semantics does not provide a theory that many would endorse. (I havent met anybody who dislikes it, actually, but neither have I met somebody who really likes it.) Meanwhile, I couldt stick to my plan of never writing a Logic textbook. It didnt do it for the money, though: unlike its competitors, this one is truly inexpensive.
As for the rest, I wont add much. My work in progress is not restricted to such topics but it goes without saying that I am not done with it yet. One thing Im not ashamed of is that I do not just write for the eggheads. Somehow I dont think that that would be right, though Im not sure Insurmountable Simplicities wont convey the wrong message. Nor do I write exclusively for the grown-ups. For many a year, Roberto and I could not found the time (or perhaps the energy) to do something useful with our illustrated philosophical stories for children, but we never said never and today, whether you like it or not, The Planet where Things Disappeared is no longer unpublished.
And do I dislike teaching? Of course not. On the contrary, there is not much in life that I like better--were it not for the vast amounts of time spent grading.