Volume 2, issue 10 of the Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy is now online.  It contains a paper by Gary Kemp, “Pushing Wittgenstein and Quine Closer Together” as well as a review by Michael Kremer of Mark Textor’s, Frege on Sense and Reference.

London and New York. Routledge, 2011, x + 291. $125.00 (hardcover); $33.95 (paperback). ISBN 978-0-415-41961-1

As against the view represented here by Peter Hacker and John Canfield, I urge that the philosophies of Quine and Wittgenstein can be reconciled. Both replace the orthodox view of language as resting on reference: Quine with the notion of linguistic disposition, Wittgenstein with the notions of grammar and forms of life. I argue that Wittgenstein’s insistence, in the rule-following discussion, that at bottom these are matters of practice, of ‘what we do’, is not only compatible in a rough sort of way with Quine’s outlook, but is very close to Quine’s naturalistic view of language. And I argue that the likely objections to this can on the one hand be explained away as Quine’s having been interested in a very narrow slice of language in comparison with Wittgenstein, and on the other by a failure to take into account later developments in Quine’s views.

https://jhaponline.org/jhap/article/view/2424

The Society for the Study of the History of Analytical Philosophy and the associated Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy have combined their social media presences: you can now follow SSHAP and JHAP together on facebook and on Twitter as @SSHAPonline.  And, as you can tell, we’ve revamped our website. You can follow posts here as well; here’s the RSS feed.

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Bertrand Russell Society Session
American Philosophy Association Central Division Meeting
Chicago Illinois
February 20, 2015

The Bertrand Russell Society is pleased to announce the Bertrand Russell Session, to be held at the APA Central Division Meeting, February 20, 2015. We welcome submissions in any area of Russell’s philosophy broadly construed. These areas can include, but are not limited to, Russell’s place in the history of philosophy or his work in/influence on logic, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of education, or ethics.

Guidelines: Presentations should be prepared for no more than 20 minutes. Submissions can either be full papers or abstracts. However, preference will be given to full papers.

Deadline: Please email submissions to dustin.olson@rochester.edu by November 23, 2014.

Bertrand Russell Society website: http://bertrandrussell.org/

Although the terms ‘poles’, ‘bipolar’, and ‘bipolarity’ do not appear in the Tractatus, it is widely held that Wittgenstein maintained his commitment to bipolarity in the Tractatus. As it is usually understood, the principle of bipolarity is that every proposition must be capable of being true and capable of being false, which rules out propositions that are necessarily true or necessarily false. Here I argue that Wittgenstein was committed to bipolarity in the Tractatus, but getting a clear view of this commitment requires a different understanding of bipolarity. Properly understood, bipolarity is the view that every proposition represents two possible states of affairs, one positive and the other negative. Of course, in the case of elementary propositions, the sense of a proposition is only the positive state of affairs. There is thus an asymmetry between what a proposition represents, its true-false poles, and what it says, its sense. In this paper I show how Wittgenstein accounted for this asymmetry in Notes on Logic and I consider two ways he might have accounted for it in the Tractatus.