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
Critique is an assertion of values pitted against a state of affairs. To say that things should not be the way they are–to respond to questions such as ‘Why do I think this political or economic arrangement is wrong (and why should I care?)?’ implies an ethical stance. Critique thus draws together fact and value, domains that a long tradition of moral thought has argued exist on distinct planes. For there are dimensions of political life that are incomprehensible without this conjunction between ethical motivations and social realities. But if they are to have political consequences, such questions cannot be confined to private introspection. Scale matters. This talk looks at the articulation between everyday interactions and social movements to show the interplay among the first, second, and third person stances that characterize ethical life. Drawing ethnographic examples from American feminism and Vietnamese Marxism, it considers some of the ways in which ethical intuitions emerge, consolidate, and change, and argues that objectifications and the reflexivity they facilitate help give ethical life a social history.
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
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
Conference Schedule
10AM Teddy Seidenfeld – Conditional Probability, Conditionalization, and Total Evidence
11AM Eleonora Cresto – Beyond Indeterminate Utilities. The Case of Neurotic Cake-Cutting
11:20AM Ignacio Ojea Quintana – Unawareness and Levi’s Consensus as Common Ground
11:40AM Rush Stewart – Uncertainty, Equality, Fraternity
1PM Nils-Eric Sahlin – Levi’s Decision Theory: Lessons Learned
1:45PM Wilfried Sieg – Scientific Theories as Set-Theoretic Predicates?
2:45PM Panel Discussion – Learning from Levi
Abstracts available in attached documents under “Supporting material.”
Memorial
A memorial service will be held at 5PM at St. Paul’s Chapel on the Columbia campus. Reception to follow on the 7th floor of Philosophy Hall.
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
In 1804 Schelling diagnosed our impending “annihilation of nature” due to our conceptual detachment from and consequent economic exploitation of our natural world. His critique of Modernity’s Cartesian Idealisms, effected through his inversion of the Kantian categories, results in a philosophical project whose relevance to our ongoing climate crisis is difficult to overstate.
Bruce Matthews
Bard College/BHSEC, professor of philosophy, research in German Idealism and Romanticism, with a focus on life and thought of F.W.J. Schelling, whose recent work revolves around Schelling’s critique of modernity with its anticipation of, as he wrote in 1804, ‘the annihilation of nature,’ and its relevance to the Anthropocene.
“Schelling in the Anthropocene: A New Mythology of Nature,” (Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy, 2015), “Schelling: A Brief Biographical Sketch of the Odysseus of German Idealism,” in The Palgrave Handbook to German Idealism (2014), and “The New Mythology: Between Romanticism and Humanism,” in The Relevance of Romanticism (Cambridge University Press, 2014). Books include the forthcoming intellectual biography, Schelling: Heretic of Modernity (2018), Schelling’s Organic Form of Philosophy: Life as the Schema of Freedom (SUNY 2011).
Presented by the Philosophy Department at The New School for Social Research
We discuss two approaches to life: presentism and futurism. The first one, which we are identifying with the Buddha, is to live in the present and not to allow the future to hinder us from living in the ever present now. The second one, which we will identify with Karl Popper, is to think before we act, and act now for a better future. We will discuss various aspects of presentism and futurism, such as Ruth Millikan’s Popperian animal, the psychologist Howard Rachlin’s social and temporal discounting, and even the popular but controversial idea, YOLO (you live only once). The purpose of this talk is to contrast one with the other. The central question of ethics is: How should one live? Our variation on that question is: When should one live? We conjecture that the notion of flow, developed by Csikszentmihalyi, may be a better optimal choice between these two positions.
This work, which is joint with Jongjin Kim, is to appear in the Journal of Buddhist Ethics.
Logic and Metaphysics Workshop:
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