[1] Gaskin is the author of many published articles and nine books, including: Language and World: A Defence of Linguistic Idealism (2020), Tragedy and Redress in Western Literature: a Philosophical Perspective (2018), Language, Truth, and Literature: a Defence of Literary Humanism (2013), The Unity of the Proposition (2008), Experience and the World's Own Language: a Critique of John McDowell's Empiricism (2006), and The Sea Battle and the Master Argument: Aristotle and Diodorus Cronus on the metaphysics of the future (1995).
[3] He studied literae humaniores (classics and philosophy) at University College, Oxford, and obtained his BA (first class) in 1982.
In 1987 he won the Gaisford Dissertation Prize in classical literature for his essay Tragedy and Subjectivity in Virgil’s 'Aeneid' .
[5] He was awarded the DPhil in 1988 for a thesis supervised by Michael Dummett, David Wiggins, and Barry Stroud, entitled Experience, Agency, and the Self.
[6] From 1988 to 1989 Gaskin spent a year as an Alexander von Humboldt visiting fellow at the University of Mainz, Germany, researching decision-making in classical literature under the Virgilian scholar Antonie Wlosok.
[9] A central part of Gaskin's work focuses on the doctrine of linguistic idealism, the idea that the world is produced by, and depends on, language.
He addresses the problem that some mathematical entities, in particular uncomputable sets of real numbers, cannot be distinguished by language; he does this by developing a ‘split-level' version of linguistic idealism.
In Tragedy and Redress in Western Literature: A Philosophical Perspective (2018), Gaskin argues that not even the tragic aspects of life (such as pain and suffering) are beyond language, an objection commonly raised against the idea that language is omnicompetent to talk about and describe reality.
[15] Gaskin has translated selections from Apollonius of Rhodes's Greek poem Argonautica into English verse.
The Sea Battle and the Master Argument: Aristotle and Diodorus Cronus on the Metaphysics of the Future (Walter de Gruyter 1995).