Robert Stalnaker is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy at MIT. He got his PhD in philosophy at Princeton University, working with Stuart Hampshire and C. G. Hempel. He taught at Yale University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Cornell University before moving to MIT in 1988. He is the author of Inquiry (MIT Press, 1984), Our Knowledge of the Internal World (OUP, 2007), and Mere possibilities (Princeton University Press, 2010), as well as two collections of papers, Context and Content (OUP, 1999) and Ways a World Might Be (OUP, 2003). He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a corresponding fellow of the British Academy.

"A useful book for specialists...Recommended. Graduate students and above." --Choice

"This new book, based on a lecture series given in Paris and Mexico City, is a monument to a research program as lively today as it was at its inception more than forty years ago--a fact that is itself testament to the strength and relevance of the early papers from which it sprang. The program has broadened to engulf tricky technical issues that have recently assumed centre stage in philosophy of language (as well as crossing over into linguistics)." -- Mind

"In sum, this is an excellent book that anyone with an interest in how context affects interpretation should read with great care. Even if one isn't interested in epistemic modals or conditionals per se, the characterization of their interpretation as essentially a function of the common ground understood as a type of attitude bears on essential questions about the nature of context and its interaction with conventional content. As in all of Stalnaker's work, there's a lot to learn here." -- Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews Online