Volume 6.1 of The Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy (JHAP) is now online, with full open-access.

It features an article by Sébastien Gandon entitled, “Sidgwick’s Legacy? Russell and Moore on Meaning and Philosophical Inquiry”. Here is an abstract:

James Levine has recently argued (1998, 2009, 2016) that there is a tension between Russell’s Moorean semantical framework and Russell’s Peano-inspired analytical practice. According to Levine, this discrepancy runs deep in Russell’s thought from 1900 to 1918, and underlies many of the doctrinal changes occurring during this period. In this paper, I suggest that, contrary to what Levine claims, there is no incompatibility between Moore’s theory of meaning and the idea of informative conceptual analysis. I show this by relating Moore’s view of meaning to his Sidgwick-inspired criticism of the so-called naturalistic fallacy. I maintain that Moore’s semantical framework has a methodological intent: following Sidgwick, Moore wants to block any attempt to justify ethical principles through setting ad hoc conditions on the meaning of the terms involved. Thus, far from grounding philosophical knowledge on subjective intuitions, as Levine suggests, Moore’s framework would provide us with the means to make room for a discursive and dialectic conception of philosophical inquiry.

JHAP is a free, open-access peer reviewed journal. It is available at https://jhaponline.org/. Submissions welcome!

The seventh annual conference of the Society for the Study of the History of Analytical Philosophy will be held at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, 19-21 June 2018. It is locally organised by Sandra Lapointe with the assistance of Sean Dudley and sponsored by the Philosophy Department at McMaster University.

Invited Speakers:

• Lydia Patton, Virginia Tech
• Nick Griffin, McMaster University
• Michael Beaney, Humboldt University Berlin and King’s College London

This year’s meeting is being held in conjunction with the Bertrand Russell Society whose conference (22-24 June 2018) convenes immediately after the SSHAP meeting. The organizers hope that SSHAP conferees will also want to attend the BRS meeting and vice versa. There are many areas of shared interest and possibilities for fruitful exchange. Information about the BRS meeting and its call for papers can be found here.

We do ask that those who wish to submit papers for both meetings not submit the very same paper.

SSHAP – Call for Abstracts or Papers

The Society for Study of the History of Analytical Philosophy is an international organization aimed at promoting discussion in all areas of scholarship concerning the development of philosophical logic, philosophy of language, the philosophy of mind, metaphysics, ethics and metaethics, the philosophy of science, and epistemology. It welcomes scholars interested in the many ways in which the disciplines were influenced by thinkers such as Bolzano, Brentano and his school, Husserl, Frege, Russell, the Vienna Circle, Wittgenstein, Tarski, Quine and the Polish school, for instance, but also seeks to promote work engaging with lesser know figures and trends.

SSHAP invites submissions for its 2018 annual conference. Paper submissions in all areas of the history of analytic philosophy are welcome.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: January 15, 2018.

In the past, some of the papers presented at the annual the conference were published in the Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy. (www.jhaponline.org)

Submission Instructions

Authors are requested to submit their long abstract electronically according to the following guidelines:

1. Long abstracts (500-1000 words) or full papers (up to 4000 words) should be prepared for blind refereeing,
2. put into PDF file format, and
3. sent as an email attachment to the address given below.
4. The subject line of the submission email should include the key-phrase “SSHAP submission”, and
5. the body text of the email message should constitute a cover page for the submission by including i) return email address, ii) author’s name, iii) affiliation, iv) paper title, and v) short abstract (50-100 words) and vi) academic rank.

Time allowed for presentation is 60 minutes (including discussion).

Electronic submissions and queries should be sent to: sshap@mcmaster.ca

For more information, please visit our website:  www.sshap.org

From Ava Chamberlain, chair of the Department of Religion, Philosophy, and Classics at Wayne State University:

Erik Banks, the author most recently of The Realistic Empiricism of Mach, James, and Russell: Neutral Monism, Reconceived, published by Cambridge University Press (2014), died on 18 August 2017, following a massive hemorrhagic stroke. He was 47 years old. The family is establishing a student scholarship in Erik’s memory. At this time, donations should be made out to the Wright State University Foundation, with a note that the contribution should be directed to the Philosophy Program Fund in memory of Erik Banks. These donations may be sent to the attention of Sara Woodhull, WSU Foundation, 3640 Col. Glenn Hwy., Dayton, Ohio 45435.

Volume 5.8 of the Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy is now online, with full open-access.

It features an article by Walter Pedriali entitled, “The Logical Significance of Assertion: Frege on the Essence of Logic”. Here is an abstract:

Assertion plays a crucial dual role in Frege’s conception of logic, a formal and a transcendental one. A recurrent complaint is that Frege’s inclusion of the judgement-stroke (the formal counterpart of assertion) in the Begriffsschrift is either in tension with his anti-psychologism or wholly superfluous. Assertion, the objection goes, is at best of merely psychological significance. In this paper, I defend Frege against the objection by giving reasons for recognising the central logical significance of assertion in both its formal and its transcendental role.

JHAP is a free, open-access peer reviewed journal. It is available at https://jhaponline.org/. Submissions welcome!

Volume 5.6 of the Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy is now online, with full open access.

It features an article by Eric D. Berg and Roy T. Cook entitled, “The Propositional Logic of Frege’s Grundgesetze: Semantics and Expressiveness”. Here is an abstract:

In this paper we compare the propositional logic of Frege’s Grundgesetze der Arithmetik to modern propositional systems, and show that Frege does not have a separable propositional logic, definable in terms of primitives of Grundgesetze, that corresponds to modern formulations of the logic of “not”, “and”, “or”, and “if…then…”. Along the way we prove a number of novel results about the system of propositional logic found in Grundgesetze, and the broader system obtained by including identity. In particular, we show that the propositional connectives that are definable in terms of Frege’s horizontal, negation, and conditional are exactly the connectives that fuse with the horizontal, and we show that the logical operators that are definable in terms of the horizontal, negation, the conditional, and identity are exactly the operators that are invariant with respect to permutations on the domain that leave the truth-values fixed. We conclude with some general observations regarding how Frege understood his logic, and how this understanding differs from modern views.

The volume also contains a discussion piece by Olav Gjelsvik entitled “Anscombe and Davidson on Practical Knowledge. A Reply to Hunter”. Abstract:

David Hunter has recently argued (in this journal) that Donald Davidson and Elizabeth Anscombe were in basic agreement about practical knowledge. In this reply, it is my contention that Hunter’s fascinating claim may not be satisfactorily warranted. To throw light on why, a more careful consideration of the role of the notion of practical knowledge in Anscombe’s approach to intentional action is undertaken. The result indicates a possible need to distinguish between what is called ‘practical knowledge’ and ‘(non-observational) knowledge of what one is doing’, and shows that Hunter’s claim concerning the closeness of Anscombe to Davidson only has plausibility for knowledge of what one is doing. Contrary to an interesting suggestion by Hunter, the paper argues that it is hard to see how Davidson’s position can benefit substantially from making use of the notion of knowledge of what one is doing.

JHAP is a free, open-access peer reviewed journal. It is available at https://jhaponline.org/. Submissions welcome!