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
Keynote: Harry Brighouse (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Pedagogy Workshop Leader: TBA
Location: The Graduate Center, CUNY—New York, New York
Abstracts & Workshop Applications due: July 31st 2023
Responses: August 31st 2023
Organizers: Michael Greer (CUNY), Maria Salazar (CUNY)
Contact email: gscope.committee@gmail.com
The committee for the Graduate Student Conference on Philosophy of Education (GSCOPE) invites abstracts for papers on the topic of Higher Education, Democracy, and Controversy. The theme of the conference & post-conference pedagogy workshop reflects the difficulty in creating and maintaining respectful discourse in higher-education classrooms, especially surrounding controversial empirical, moral, and political issues. Some argue that this is an equity issue. Undergraduate students who come from rural and/or underprivileged areas are more likely to experience alienation on campus, sometimes because they have never been exposed to certain “politically correct” language or ideas, and sometimes simply because they lack the financial and social capital that their peers have. It seems crucial (and follows from democratic and civic values) to foster safe learning environments for all students, especially those students who are more likely to feel alienated on college campuses and in elite spaces. At the same time, some argue that the aim of higher education is purely epistemological, and not civic or democratic. Proponents of this view might hold that free speech and academic freedom must be properly protected for higher education to perform its proper social function: education. What is the appropriate relationship between higher education, knowledge-production, teaching, free speech, and democracy? How can higher education instructors and professors be effective teachers in the light of these relationships?
Papers must pertain to higher educationbut maybe about anything from interpersonal classroom dynamicstoinstitutional policies to campus controversy. We are particularly interested in papers that explore the following topics:
- Philosophical issues around teaching controversy
- Navigating different identities in the classroom and on campus
- Free speech and controversial issues in classrooms and on campus
- Differential roles of various higher education actors when it comes to protecting free speech (administration, tenured professors, students, residential life)
- Training (or lack thereof) of graduate students to be teachers and the impact of this on teaching in our current political moment
- Theright relationship(s) between democracy, knowledge,free speech, and higher education
- The role of controversy in democracy
- The relationship between controversy and equality
- Teaching as an equity issue – how education might foster or impede different kinds of equity (class equity, racial equity, urban/rural equity, gender equity)
- Disagreement in classrooms
- Epistemological issues around disagreement and understanding
- Trust in classrooms
- Pedagogical tools to cope with disagreement in classrooms
- Philosophical views on coming to understanding from different social locations, epistemic commitments, and material circumstances
We especially welcome contributions that:
- Think about universities outside of the “top 50” and the “top 500” — we want our conversation to reflect issues found across the entire spectrum of international higher ed institutions
- Engage with CUNY-specific issues and offer CUNY-specific solutions
Abstracts should:
– Outline the paper’s principal argument(s).
– Give a good sense of the paper’s philosophical and/or empirical contributions and methods.
– Be anonymized.
Proposal Guidelines:
Please submit abstracts of up to 500 words by midnight EST on Monday, July 31, 2023.
PDF or DOC.X by email to gscope.committee@gmail.com
Post-Conference Pedagogy Workshop
The theme of our conference Higher Education, Democracy, and Controversy is relevant to graduate student educators, who are routinely under-trained and under-equipped to engage with real-life problems they may encounter in the classroom. The lack of training for higher education teachers is a growing iue in philosophy of education.
This workshop attends to this issue by facilitating a space for graduate student educators to reflect on how to foster good teaching environments for controversial issues, and be good interlocutors with each other on controversial issues. The workshop will also touch on promoting equity in classrooms. We will provide workshop participants with a certificate of completion.
https://philevents.org/event/show/112546