The Saul Kripke Center is pleased to announce that James Shaw (Associate Professor, Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh) will deliver a talk on Thursday, February 17th, 2022, from 2:00 to 4:00 pm (NY time) via Zoom. The talk is free and open to all, but those interested in attending should email the Saul Kripke Center in advance to register if they are not part of the CUNY Graduate Center’s Philosophy Program or are not on the Saul Kripke Center’s mailing list.
Title: Kripkean Necessities, Imaginative Kripke Puzzles, and Semantic Transparency
Abstract: Kripke (1980) famously argued that some a posteriori statements are necessary when true. I begin by exploring an unusual technique to try to learn these necessities merely through imagination that I call “Semantic Imaginative Transfer”. I explore an idealized instance of this technique which I suggest leads to an imaginative variant of Kripke’s (1979) puzzle about belief. I note that on some widespread assumptions (including that propositional idiom can be maintained in the face of Kripke puzzles), the idealized example restricts the space for accommodating Kripkean necessities to two families of views: familiar, broadly Guise-Theoretic approaches to propositional attitudes, and unconventional and largely unexplored views embracing semantic transparency principles. I briefly review some of the history of transparency principles, make some conjectures as to why they went out of fashion following the work of semantic externalists (including Kripke), and make a plea for exploring the consequences of their adoption. Along the way I note the significance of doing so: the transparency principles render Kripkean necessities a priori.
Our speakers will be Karen Lewis (Columbia), Sam Berstler (MIT), Ray Buchanan (Texas/Austin), and Elmar Unnsteinsson (UC Dublin and U of Iceland). We will post titles and abstracts for their talks, along with a schedule of who is speaking when, soon.
If you are not a faculty or student at CUNY, you will have to RSVP for the event at this URL, no later than Monday, November 14th:
https://forms.gle/KN3YJNaCs5yHPtBP7
Please also be prepared to show proof of vaccination when you enter the building.
This conference celebrates the 50th anniversary of the first publication of Saul Kripke’s masterpiece, Naming and Necessity, by showcasing new work on a range of topics on which it has had a lasting influence. These topics include, but are not limited to: the nature of names and natural kind terms; the failure of the description or cluster/description theories; the distinction between metaphysical necessity and epistemic apriority; empty names; the metaphysics of essence and origin; the nature of modality and possible worlds; conceivability and the epistemology of modality; the role of philosophical intuition; and the mind-body problem.
Dates: 12th and 13th December, from 9am to 5pm.
Venue: The CUNY Graduate Center, 365 5th Avenue, New York, New York.
Format: hybrid
Registration: for both online and in person attendance, please register by the 28th of November, 2022 at https://forms.gle/Jbr3uaFx1ZwRxJpZ7.
Speakers:
Organisers:
Lectures:
Romina Birman, Paul Boghossian, Michael Devitt, Hartry Field, Melvin Fitting, Daniel Isaacson, Carl Posy, Robert Stalnaker
Reminiscences:
James Burgess, David Chalmers, Mircea Dumitru, Margaret Gilbert, Antonella Mallozzi, Oliver Marshall, Yiannis Moschovakis, Stephen Neale, Gary Ostertag, David Papineau, Graham Priest, Teresa Robertson Ishii, Nathan Salmon, Larry Tribe, lakovos Vasiliou, Timothy Williamson
For more information contact kripkecenter@gc.cuny.edu
The philosophy of art, as practiced in the western world, has tended to have two divided homes: in analytic philosophy and continental philosophy. Within the analytic tradition, the philosophy of art has recently undergone a revival with the emphasis on perception. This has more closely aligned art theory to science and questions of biology as well as to issues within psychology. The continental tradition has traditionally drawn upon phenomenology’s first-person experience with its ties to embodied perception as well as the social and historical concerns of the social aspect of art. In the realm itself of visual art, the state of (so-called) post-post modernism has resulted in both the dissolution of belief in progress and even, according to some art critics, a lamentable stagnation. But many philosophers of the last century, beginning with Walter Benjamin, Adorno, Nelson Goodman, etc., have suggested that art needs to be thought of within its social, pragmatic, or epistemological functions, suggesting perhaps a need to think of art outside the confines of modernism’s stylistic revolutions and formalist issues. Relatedly, the pluralism within science could be accessed as model for this enterprise. Multiple views on a phenomenon are required due to the complexity of the enterprise, and the practice of both making art and of perceiving it might be in that category. This conference seeks to bring these strands, the analytical and the continental ones, together and evaluate how to move forward with art theory in an age of globalization.
We welcome submissions on these possible questions:
1. Should we value a diversity of perspectives in art theory? If so, what is the value? If not, why not?
2. Are there aspects of art that we presume to be universal that are, in fact, culturally situated?
3. How should different ways of experiencing art be characterized?
4. What is the epistemological function of art?
5. How does the monetary role in art affect both the artist and the perceiver of art?
6. How do the mechanics of seeing (e.g., gist perception, peripheral vision, etc.) affect how we experience art?
7. How does the practice of making art relate to the first-person experience?
8. What role does Husserl’s “bracketing” have in the viewing or making of art?
9. Are there specific non-western traditions that provide a better explanatory solution for the role of art than have the competing paradigms of continental and analytic?
We welcome your participation and look forward to your contributions. Papers should not extend over 45 minutes. Q & A are 15 minutes.
To submit anonymized abstract BY JULY 15, 2024: papers: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe5c9bmoBYb3hCAb0YWWfzV0BLWbhig2PD5VeKU358VA3RKGw/viewform?usp=sf_link