There are two readings for this week:
Both refer back to an earlier paper by Leslie, Leslie (2008), which is also well worth reading, but which I am not assigning.
Two good overview articles of recent work on generics are Leslie and Lerner (2026) and Liebesman and Sterken (2021).
References
Leslie, Sarah-Jane. 2008. “Generics: Cognition and Acquisition.” The Philosophical Review 117 (1): 1–47. https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-2007-023.
Leslie, Sarah-Jane. 2017. “The Original Sin of Cognition: Fear, Prejudice, and Generalization.” Journal of Philosophy 114 (8): 393–421. https://doi.org/10.5840/jphil2017114828.
Leslie, Sarah-Jane, and Adam Lerner. 2026. “Generic Generalizations.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Fall 2026, edited by Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2026/entries/generics/.
Liebesman, David, and Rachel Katharine Sterken. 2021. “Generics and the Metaphysics of Kinds.” Philosophy Compass 16 (7): e12754. https://doi.org/10.1111/phc3.12754.
Saul, Jennifer. 2017. “Are Generics Especially Pernicious?” Inquiry, February 13, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2017.1285995.