CUNY Pragmatics Workshop
Relevance, Games, and Communication
Tuesday, October 14 (Room 9207)
10:15 Coffee
10:30 Rohit Parikh (CUNY) “Grice, Hoare and Nash: contributions to pragmatics from game theory and program semantics”
11:30 Peter Godfrey-Smith (CUNY) “What do generalizations of the Lewis signaling model tell us about information and meaning?”
12:30 Lunch
1:30 Prashant Parikh (CUNY) “Deriving illocutionary meaning”
2:30 Student Presentations:
Ignacio Ojea (Columbia) “Credibility and the stability of what is conveyed”
Todd Stambaugh (CUNY) “Implicatures, etchings, and coffee”
Cagil Tasdemir (CUNY) “Influencing behavior by influencing beliefs”
3:30 Coffee
4:15 Ariel Rubinstein (Tel Aviv/NYU) “A Typology of Players”
5:30 Reception
7:00 Speakers’ dinner
Wednesday, October 15 (Room 9207)
9:15 Coffee
9:30 Daniel Harris (CUNY) “Act-theoretic semantics for pragmatics”
10:30 Larry Horn (Yale) “Trivial pursuits: on being orderly”
11:30 Stephen Neale (CUNY) “All meaning is natural meaning?”
12:30 Lunch
1:30 Robyn Carston (UCL) “Systematicity, optionality and relevance”
2:30 Student Presentations
Elmar Unnsteinsson (CUNY) “The pragmatics of malapropisms”
Marilynn Johnson (CUNY) “Why we implicate: revising Pinker’s game-theoretic proposal”
Jesse Rappaport (CUNY) “Parsimony in linguistic theorizing: a double-edged razor”
3:30 Coffee
4:15 Keynote Talk & Philosophy Colloquium
Deirdre Wilson (UCL/Oslo) “Explaining Metonymy”
6:00 Reception
7:30 Speakers’ dinner
The CUNY Pragmatics Workshop is funded by a CUNY Collaborative Incentive Research Grant (CIRG# 2033) with additional support from the Program in Philosophy and the John H Kornblith Fund.
Lectures on Wittgenstein and Hume
delivered by
Mark Steiner
Emeritus Professor of Philosophy,
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
2-4 pm
Wednesday,
Nov 16, Nov 30, Dec 7
The CUNY Graduate Center,
Room 9205/6
Lectures on Wittgenstein and Hume
delivered by
Mark Steiner
Emeritus Professor of Philosophy,
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
2-4 pm
Wednesday,
Nov 16, Nov 30, Dec 7
The CUNY Graduate Center,
Room 9205/6
Lectures on Wittgenstein and Hume
delivered by
Mark Steiner
Emeritus Professor of Philosophy,
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
2-4 pm
Wednesday,
Nov 16, Nov 30, Dec 7
The CUNY Graduate Center,
Room 9205/6
The paper draws on the first sentence of Nicomachean Ethics I, but goes beyond interpretation in putting forward a new version of the Guise of the Good (GG). This proposal is Aristotelian in spirit, but defended on philosophical grounds. GG theorists tend to see their views as broadly speaking Aristotelian. And yet they address particular actions in isolation: agents, the thought goes, are motivated to perform a given action by seeing the action or its outcome as good. The paper argues that the GG is most compelling if we distinguish between three levels: the motivation of small-scale actions, the motivation of mid-scale actions or pursuits, and the desire to have one’s life go well. The paper analyzes the relation between small-, mid-, and large-scale motivation in terms of Guidance, Substance, and Motivational Dependence. In its Aristotelian version, the argument continues, the GG belongs to the theory of the human good.
Katja Maria Vogt, Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. She specializes in ancient philosophy, ethics, and normative epistemology. In her books and papers, she focuses on questions that figure both in ancient and in contemporary discussions: What are values? What kind of values are knowledge and truth? What does it mean to want one’s life to go well?
Presented by The New School for Social Research (NSSR) Philosophy Department.
One way for an attempt at explanation to fail is for the explanans (which does the
explaining) to be too close to the explanandum (the thing explained). In this paper
I discuss this feature, which I call explanatory distance. I consider some different
approaches to explanatory distance, and propose an account of explanatory
distance articulated in terms of dependence. I then discuss the implications of this
View for some recent applications of grounding.
Schedule for Spring 2018
Here is a sneak peak at our exciting line-up of speakers and events for Spring 2018. Some times and rooms TBA.
Elanor Taylor, February 8, CUNY Graduate Center, The Committee for Interdisciplinary Science Studies, Room 5307, 4:00-6:00pm
Virginia Aspe Armella and Ma. Elena García Peláez Cruz (co-sponsored with SWIP-Analytic Mexico), March 2, NYU Room 202, 2:00-4:30pm
Round Table Women in Philosophy: Publishing, Jobs, and Fitting In (co-sponsored with NYSWIP), March 8, CUNY Graduate Center, The Committee for Interdisciplinary Science Studies, Room 5307, 4:30-7:30pm
Graduate Student Essay Prize Winner Presentation, April 12
Sophie Horowitz (UMass, Amherst), April 26
There is a broad consensus that Aristotle introduced the concept of matter in order to develop a consistent account of substantial change. However, it is disputed which role matter fulfills in substantial change. According to the traditional interpretation, matter persists while taking on or losing a substantial form. According to a rival interpretation, matter does not persist in substantial change; instead, it is an entity from which a new substance can emerge and which ceases to exist in this process. In my view, both interpretations are problematic in the light of Aristotle’s broader ontological project and are at odds with the way Aristotle describes the substantial generation of living beings. On the basis of Aristotle’s biological theory, I will suggest that Aristotelian matter is a continuant in substantial generation, but does not satisfy the common criteria for persistence that apply to individual substances.
Anna Schriefl
Anna Schriefl is Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin (assistant professor) at the University of Bonn, and currently a visiting scholar at the New School. She has published a book about Plato’s criticism of money and wealth, and most recently an introduction into Stoicism (both in German).