A sensible approach to the semantics of tense says that present tense and past tense “refer” to the evaluation time and to some pre-evaluation time, respectively. Indeed, this seems to be the case in unembedded sentences (e.g., Mary is thirty-five, Mary was thirty-five). But embedded tenses seem to misbehave: (1) does not express the proposition that two months prior to s* (= the speech time) Joseph was sure about the truth of [Mary is currently thirty-five]; this proposition is expressed by (2). Assuming that tenses are indexical expressions does not automatically solve the problem, since (1) does not express the proposition that two months prior to s* Joseph was sure about the truth of [Mary will be thirty-five at s*] either; that proposition is expressed by (3). (In addition, (2) does not express the proposition that two months prior to s* Joseph was sure about the truth of [Mary will be thirty-five at some s** < s*].) In fact, (1) roughly expresses the proposition that two months prior to s* Joseph was sure about the truth of [Mary is currently thirty-five and will still be thirty-five at s*] (Smith (1978), Enc (1987)). Indeed, unlike (1), (1′) is usually quite odd (presumably because most speakers presuppose that, like them, Joseph can accept that Mary is thirty-five for a period of two – sometimes even twelve – months, but not that she is thirty-five for a period of twenty months). To explain why the embedded past in (2) “refers” to the embedded evaluation time, and why the embedded present in (1)/(1’) “refers” to a time much larger than that, we assume, with Abusch (1997), that these embedded tenses are indexical expressions governed by general constraints on ‘de re’ attitude reports, including – crucially – the Upper Limit Constraint. Expanding on Abusch (1997) and Percus (2013), we derive the Upper Limit Constraint itself from general principles as well.
Logic and Metaphysics Workshop Fall 2019
September 2 GC Closed NO MEETING
September 9 Yael Sharvit, UCLA
September 16 Ole Hjortland and Ben Martin, Bergen
September 23 Alessandro Rossi, StAndrews
September 30 GC Closed NO MEETING
October 7 Dongwoo Kim, GC
October 14 GC Closed NO MEETING
October 21 Rohit Parikh, GC
October 28 Barbara Montero, GC
November 4 Sergei Aretmov, GC
November 11 Martin Pleitz, Muenster
November 18
November 25
December 2 Jessica Wilson, Toronto
December 9 Mark Colyvan, Sydney
December 16 MAYBE A MEETING; MAYBE NOT
Ronald Dworkin’s work always spanned a wide array of topics, from the most abstract jurisprudence through the details of American constitutional law all the way over to political philosophy and theories of justice and equality. In the last decades of his life, however, Dworkin’s work flowered in ways that went beyond even this prodigious range. Though he continued his central work in the philosophy of law and constitutional theory, he also addressed issues in international law, human dignity, the philosophy of religion, the relation between ethics, morality and legal theory, and the unity of practical thought generally. This conference will explore some of these themes in Dworkin’s late work. Beginning with a panel on his understanding of religion, we will also convene discussions of his work on legal integrity, international law, and the relation between law and morality. There will be a total of nine presentations, with plenty of time for discussion. All are welcome.
Panel 1 (Friday 1:30 p.m.): Dworkin’s Religion without God.
Eric Gregory (Princeton),
Moshe Halbertal (NYU and Hebrew U.) Ronald Dworkin Religion Without God: Morality and the Transcendent
Larry Sager (Texas) Solving Religious Liberty
Panel 2 (Friday 4:30 p.m.): Dworkin on international law.
Samantha Besson (Fribourg)
The Political Legitimacy of International Law: Sovereign States and their International Institutional Order
John Tasioulas (King’s College, London)
Panel 3 (Saturday 10 a.m.): The idea of integrity in Law’s Empire.
Andrei Marmor (Cornell) Integrity in Law’s Empire
Jeremy Waldron (NYU) The Rise and Decline of Integrity
Panel 4 (Saturday 2:15 p.m.): Law and morality in Justice for Hedgehogs.
Mark Greenberg (UCLA)
What Makes a Moral Duty Legal? Dworkin’s Judicial Enforcement Theory Versus the Moral Impact Theory
Ben Zipursky (Fordham)
According to logical anti-exceptionalism we come to be justified in believing logical theories by similar means to scientific theories. This is often explained by saying that theory choice in logic proceeds via abductive arguments (Priest, Russell, Williamson, Hjortland). Thus, the success of classical and non-classical theories of validity are compared by their ability to explain the relevant data. However, as of yet there is no agreed upon account of which data logical theories must explain, and subsequently how they prove their mettle. In this paper, we provide a non-causal account of logical explanation, and show how it can accommodate important disputes about logic.
Logic and Metaphysics Workshop Fall 2019
September 2 GC Closed NO MEETING
September 9 Yael Sharvit, UCLA
September 16 Ole Hjortland and Ben Martin, Bergen
September 23 Alessandro Rossi, StAndrews
September 30 GC Closed NO MEETING
October 7 Dongwoo Kim, GC
October 14 GC Closed NO MEETING
October 21 Rohit Parikh, GC
October 28 Barbara Montero, GC
November 4 Sergei Aretmov, GC
November 11 Martin Pleitz, Muenster
November 18
November 25
December 2 Jessica Wilson, Toronto
December 9 Mark Colyvan, Sydney
December 16 MAYBE A MEETING; MAYBE NOT
Logic has frequently played an exceptional role in philosophical projects. The laws of logic have been considered self-evident, obvious or a priori, and therefore epistemologically foundational. As a result, logic has been set apart from the other sciences.
According to anti-exceptionalism, however, the privileged epistemological status of logical laws has been exaggerated. Instead, both logical theories and theory-choice in logic are continuous with the theories and methods of other sciences. But what does that tell us about theory-choice in logic, and does it help us adjudicate in the many disputes between rival logical theories?
Speakers:
Jc Beall (UConn)
Christopher Blake-Turner (UNC Chapel Hill)
Ole Hjortland (University of Bergen)
Saul Kripke (CUNY)
Ben Martin (University of Bergen)
Romina Padro (CUNY)
Graham Priest (CUNY)
Marcus Rossberg (UConn)
Lionel Shapiro (UConn)
Stewart Shapiro (OSU)
Gillian Russell (UNC Chapel Hill)
Registration
Registration deadline: September 1, 2019, 9:00am EST
How to register: ole.hjortland @@@@ uib.no
This essay tries to develop a “black radical Kantianism” – that is, a Kantianism informed by the black experience in modernity. After looking briefly at socialist and feminist appropriations of Kant, I argue that an analogous black radical appropriation should draw on the distinctive social ontology and view of the state associated with the black radical tradition. In ethics, this would mean working with a (color-conscious rather than colorblind) social ontology of white persons and black sub-persons and then asking what respect for oneself and others would require under those circumstances. In political philosophy, it would mean framing the state as a Rassenstaat (a racial state) and then asking what measures of corrective justice would be necessary to bring about the ideal Rechtsstaat.
Response by César Cabezas Gamarra.
Presented by the German Idealism Workshop
Noneism is the theory according to which some things do not exist. Following an established convention, I will call allism the negation of noneism (every thing exists). Lewis [1990] and, more recently, Woodward [2013] argued that the allism/noneism dispute turns on an equivocation about the meaning of ‘exists’ and would thereby be merely verbal. These arguments have been attacked by Priest [2005, 2011, 2013], who took the dispute to be genuine. In this paper, I will present two new arguments for the genuineness of the allism/noneism dispute. The first appeals to a recent version of logical pluralism defended by Kouri Kissel [Forth]: the two parties could be seen as engaging in a metalinguistic negotiation, that is, a normative disagreement about which meaning of ‘exists’ is best suited for a certain domain of discourse. Secondly, Williamson [1987] indicated a proof-theoretic criterion the two sides should meet in order for their dispute to count as genuine: they must share enough rules of inference governing ‘exist’ to characterise it up to logical equivalence. This challenge, I argue, can be met.
Logic and Metaphysics Workshop Fall 2019 Schedule:
September 2 GC Closed NO MEETING
September 9 Yael Sharvit, UCLA
September 16 Ole Hjortland and Ben Martin, Bergen
September 23 Alessandro Rossi, St. Andrews
September 30 GC Closed NO MEETING
October 7 Dongwoo Kim, GC
October 14 GC Closed NO MEETING
October 21 Rohit Parikh, GC
October 28 Barbara Montero, GC
November 4 Sergei Aretmov, GC
November 11 Martin Pleitz, Muenster
November 18
November 25
December 2 Jessica Wilson, Toronto
December 9 Mark Colyvan, Sydney
December 16 MAYBE A MEETING; MAYBE NOT
Columbia University’s Department of Philosophy, the Morningside Institute, and the Thomistic Institute invite graduate students in philosophy, theology/religious studies, literature, and related disciplines to submit papers for “The Moral Imagination of the Novel.” The conference will examine the ways in which individual novels and the novel as a literary genre can be understood both to depict the search for moral, philosophical, and religious truth and to engage in this very search themselves. Is the novel a realistic or idealistic genre? Can novels expand our sense of moral possibilities? Can they contract them?
The conference will begin with four twenty-minute graduate student papers on Friday, October 4, followed by talks that day and the next from faculty. Confirmed speakers include:
Paul Elie (Georgetown)
Ann Astell (Notre Dame)
Thomas Pavel (Chicago)
Lauren Kopajtic (Fordham)
Dhananjay Jagannathan (Columbia)
Limited financial assistance is available to defray the cost of travel for student presenters, but students are encouraged to seek funds from their own institutions as well.
One-page proposals should be emailed to Molly Gurdon at mcg2197@columbia.edu by Saturday, August 31 to be considered. Invitations to present papers will be sent by Friday, September 6. Submissions should not contain any identifying information except for a title, but the author’s institution and program, along with the title of their proposed submission, should be noted in the e-mail submission.
Many have thought that Davidson’s Swampman scenario offers a serious problem to teleosemantics. For it appears to be possible from the scenario that there are completely ahistorical creatures with beliefs, and this apparent possibility contradicts the theory. In a series of papers (2001, 2006, 2016), Papineau argues that the Swampman scenario is not even the start of an objection to teleosemantics as a scientific reduction of belief. It is against this claim that I want to argue here. I shall argue that the explanatory power of teleosemantics rests on two conceptual pillars, namely success semantics and the etiological conception of biological function, and that the Swampman scenario questions the adequacy of the foundational conceptual commitments. Along the way, some general connection between explanation and modality will be developed that sheds a new light on Kripke’s analysis of necessary a posteriori propositions. The conclusion will be that teleosemanticists should tackle the Swampman objection head on.
Logic and Metaphysics Workshop Fall 2019
September 2 GC Closed NO MEETING
September 9 Yael Sharvit, UCLA
September 16 Ole Hjortland and Ben Martin, Bergen
September 23 Alessandro Rossi, StAndrews
September 30 GC Closed NO MEETING
October 7 Dongwoo Kim, GC
October 14 GC Closed NO MEETING
October 21 Rohit Parikh, GC
October 28 Barbara Montero, GC
November 4 Sergei Aretmov, GC
November 11 Martin Pleitz, Muenster
November 18
November 25
December 2 Jessica Wilson, Toronto
December 9 Mark Colyvan, Sydney
December 16 MAYBE A MEETING; MAYBE NOT
September 2 GC Closed NO MEETING
September 9 Yael Sharvit, UCLA
September 16 Ole Hjortland and Ben Martin, Bergen
September 23 Alessandro Rossi, StAndrews
September 30 GC Closed NO MEETING
October 7 Dongwoo Kim, GC
October 14 GC Closed NO MEETING
October 21 Rohit Parikh, GC
October 28 Barbara Montero, GC
November 4 Sergei Aretmov, GC
November 11 Martin Pleitz, Muenster
November 18 Matias Bulnes, CUNY
November 25 Vincent Peluce, CUNY
December 2 Jessica Wilson, Toronto
December 9 Mark Colyvan, Sydney
December 16 MAYBE A MEETING; MAYBE NOT
Contact Crina Gschwandtner for more information.