Resolute Readings of Wittgenstein and Nonsense

jhap, News, , ,

Volume 8.10 of The Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy (JHAP) has now been published online, with full open-access.

It features an article by Joseph Ulatowski entitled, “Resolute Readings of Wittgenstein and Nonsense”. Here is the abstract:

The aim of this paper is to show that a corollary of resolute readings of Wittgenstein’s conception of nonsense cannot be sustained. First, I describe the corollary. Next, I point out the relevance to it of Wittgenstein’s discussion of family resemblance concepts. Then, I survey some typical uses of nonsense to see what they bring to an ordinary language treatment of the word “nonsense” and its relatives. I will subsequently consider the objection, on behalf of a resolute reading, that “nonsense” is a term of philosophical criticism. Finally, I conclude that resolute readings have not sufficiently accounted for how nonsense behaves in our language; they have failed to heed Wittgenstein’s warning: “don’t think, but look!”

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

The Vienna Circle’s Reception of Nietzsche / Review of work on Quine

jhap, News

Volume 8.9 of The Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy (JHAP) has now been published online, with full open-access.

It features an article by Andreas Vrahimis entitled, “The Vienna Circle’s Reception of Nietzsche”. Here is the abstract:

Friedrich Nietzsche was among the figures from the history of nineteenth-century philosophy that, perhaps surprisingly, some of the Vienna Circle’s members had presented as one of their predecessors. While, primarily for political reasons, most Anglophone figures in the history of analytic philosophy had taken a dim view of Nietzsche, the Vienna Circle’s leader Moritz Schlick admired and praised Nietzsche, rejecting what he saw as a misinterpretation of Nietzsche as a militarist or proto-fascist. Schlick, Frank, Neurath, and Carnap were in different ways committed to the view that Nietzsche made a significant contribution to the overcoming of metaphysics. Some of these philosophers praised the intimate connection Nietzsche drew between his philosophical outlook and empirical studies in psychology and physiology. In his 1912 lectures on Nietzsche, Schlick maintained that Nietzsche overcame an initial Schopenhauerian metaphysical-artistic phase in his thinking, and subsequently remained a positivist until his last writings. Frank and Neurath made the weaker claim that Nietzsche contributed to the development of a positivistic or scientific conception of the world. Schlick and Frank took a further step in seeing the mature Nietzsche as an Enlightenment thinker.

The volume also contains a review of Sean Morris, Quine, New Foundations, and the Philosophy of Set Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), written by Henri Wagner.

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

Audrey Yap is the new Editor in Chief of JHAP

jhap, News

Audrey Yap (University of Victoria) is now Editor in Chief of the Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy. Audrey works works primarily in feminist philosophy, and has written on gendered violence and epistemic injustice, though she is also a historian and philosopher of mathematics, and has published in dynamic epistemic logic. Together with Roy Cook, she is co-editing a volume on feminist philosophy and formal logic. She succeeds Marcus Rossberg (UConn), who has concluded a productive three-year term, achieving, among other things, JHAP’s acceptance by Scopus. Marcus remains on the editorial board. Many thanks to Marcus for his service.

Solving the Conjunction Problem of Russell’s Principles of Mathematics / Review of On the Genealogy of Universals

jhap, News, ,

Volume 8.8 of The Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy (JHAP) has now been published online, with full open-access.

It features an article by Gregory Landini entitled, “Solving the Conjunction Problem of Russell’s Principles of Mathematics”. Here is an abstract:

The quantification theory of propositions in Russell’s Principles of Mathematics has been the subject of an intensive study and in reconstruction has been found to be complete with respect to analogs of the truths of modern quantification theory. A difficulty arises in the reconstruction, however, because it presents universally quantified exportations of five of Russell’s axioms. This paper investigates whether a formal system can be found that is more faithful to Russell’s original prose. Russell offers axioms that are universally quantified implications that have antecedent clauses that are conjunctions. The presence of conjunctions as antecedent clauses seems to doom the theory from the onset, it will be found that there is no way to prove conjunctions so that, after universal instantiation, one can detach the needed antecedent clauses. Amalgamating two of Russell’s axioms, this paper overcomes the difficulty.

The volume also contains a review of Fraser MacBride, On the Genealogy of Universals: The Metaphysical Origins of Analytic Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), written by Landon D. C. Elkind.

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

Sellars, Price, and the Myth of the Given / Review of work on Kant’s logic

jhap, News, , , ,

Volume 8.7 of The Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy (JHAP) has now been published online, with full open-access.

It features an article by Michael R. Hicks entitled, “Sellars, Price, and the Myth of the Given”. Here is an abstract:

Wilfrid Sellars’s “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” (EPM) begins with an argument against sense-datum epistemology. There is some question about the validity of this attack, stemming in part from the assumption that Sellars is concerned with epistemic foundationalism. This paper recontextualizes Sellars’s argument in two ways: by showing how the argument of EPM relates to Sellars’s 1940s work, which does not concern foundationalism at all; and by considering the view of H.H. Price, Sellars’s teacher at Oxford and the only classical datum theorist to receive substantive comment in EPM. Timm Triplett has claimed that Sellars’s discussion simply begs the question against Price, but this depends on the mistaken assumption that Sellars’s concern is with foundationalism.  On the contrary, Sellars’s argument concerns the assumption that the innate capacity for sensory experience counts as “thinking in presence” in the way needed for empiricist accounts of content acquisition. Price’s distinction between noticing universals and being aware of them encapsulates the tensions empiricists face here.

The volume also contains a review of Huaping Lu-Adler, Kant and the Science of Logic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), written by Tyke Nunez.

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

Truth 20/20 online conference

Meetings, News

The conference announced below features some sessions in the area of History of Analytic Philosophy that may be of interest to SSHAP members.

TRUTH 20/20

Online Conference Announcement

27 July 2020 – 6 August 2020
http://tinyurl.com/truth-conference-2020 

TRUTH 20/20, an online conference on the nature and value of truth, will be held from 27 July 2020 through 6 August 2020.  The conference will be convened by the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute Future of Truth Project, the University of Waikato Philosophy Programme, and Virtual International Consortium for Truth Research (VICTR). 

TRUTH 20/20 brings together a community of philosophers united by an interest in understanding the nature and value of truth. The year 2020 is unlike any in recent memory. We face the novel COVID-19 pandemic as well as an ongoing pandemic of misinformation driven by political propaganda, fake news, personalized social media, and the politicization of basic facts.   As the coronavirus pandemic has spread across the globe, we have been forced to reinvent and reimagine how we interact with one another.  Nowhere is this more perspicuous than in scholarly pursuits. What better way to have an online socially-distanced conference than one that focuses on the topic of truth? 

The conference is free and open to everyone with an interest in philosophy, especially those with an interest in theories of truth, history of analytic philosophy, and philosophical logic. The conference will employ the Zoom platform for the meeting. Anyone who would like to attend should register for the conference at http://www.tinyurl.com/truth-conference-2020-register, preferably before 24 July 2020, so that details about the Zoom link may be sent to you before the start of the conference. 

A simple request to attendees: In lieu of conference registration fees, hotel and travel accommodation, and restaurant and pub bills, conference curators humbly ask participants and attendees to make a donation to a charitable organisation, such as Oxfam, Black Lives Matter Global Network, or Centre for Disaster Philanthropy – COVID-19 Response Fund. 

Conference schedule (all times given in US Eastern Daylight Time): 

Monday, 27 July 2020, 10:00AM EDT
Paul Horwich (NYU), “Wittgenstein on Truth”
Susanna Melkonian-Altshuler (UConn), “Directionality for Minimalism: A Piecemeal Approach”
María Jose Frápolli (Granada), “Why is Truth So Elusive” 

Tuesday, 28 July 2020, 10:00AM EDT
Special session on Jan Woleński & Peter Simons’ “De Veritate: Austro-Polish Contributions to the Theory of Truth from Brentano to Tarski” — 30 Years On 

Anna Brożek (Warsaw), “Analysis of Concepts from Brentano to Tarski: Austro-Polish Contributions to Methodology of Philosophy”
Maria van der Schaar (Leiden), “Judgements as Bearers of Truth”
Jan Woleński (Jagiellonian University, Kraków) & Peter Simons (Trinity College, Dublin), “Reminiscence on ‘De Veritate…’”

Thursday, 30 July 2020, 10:00AM EDT
Arvid Båve (Kent/Stockholm), “Propositions and their Truth Conditions”
Marcus Rossberg (UConn), “An Inferentialist Redundacy Theory of Truth” 

Thursday, 30 July 2020, 07:00PM EDT
Smoke and Flickering Shadows: Strawson and Evans on Truth and Factuality

Chair: Huw Price (Sydney/Cambridge)
Discussants: Douglas Edwards (Utica), Cheryl Misak (Toronto), Amie Thomasson (Dartmouth) 

Monday, 3 August 2020, 10:00AM EDT
Author Meets Critics: Douglas Edwards’ The Metaphysics of Truth

Critics: Bradley Armour-Garb (SUNY-Albany), Nathan Kellen (Kansas State), Michael P. Lynch (UConn) 

Tuesday, 4 August 2020, 10:00AM EDT
Author Meets Critics: Cheryl Misak’s Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers

Critics: Simon Blackburn (UNC/Cambridge), Liam Kofi Bright (London School of Economics), Jennifer Hornsby (Birbeck College, London) 

Thursday, 6 August 2020, 10:00AM EDT
Morning / Afternoon Tea Social Hour

  • Recap of the conference
  • Discussion regarding the Future of Truth project at the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute
  • An Introduction to the Virtual International Consortium for Truth Research

The online conference is curated by:
Robert Barnard rwbjr@olemiss.edu 
Adam Podlaskowski apodlaskowski@fairmontstate.edu 
Marcus Rossberg marcus.rossberg@uconn.edu 
Joseph Ulatowski joe.ulatowski@waikato.ac.nz 
Chase Wrenn cwrenn@ua.edu

The Birth of Semantics

jhap, News, , , ,

Volume 8.6 of The Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy (JHAP) has now been published online, with full open-access.

It features an article by Richard Kimberly Heck and Robert C. May entitled, “The Birth of Semantics”. Here is an abstract:

We attempt here to trace the evolution of Frege’s thought about truth. What most frames the way we approach the problem is a recognition that hardly any of Frege’s most familiar claims about truth appear in his earliest work. We argue that Frege’s mature views about truth emerge from a fundamental re-thinking of the nature of logic instigated, in large part, by a sustained engagement with the work of George Boole and his followers, after the publication of Begriffsschrift and the appearance of critical reviews by members of the Boolean school.

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

Extending New Narratives Post-Doctoral Fellowships: Call for Applications

News

The project New Narratives in the History of Philosophy, supported by the SSHRC Partnership Grant, invites applications for postdoctoral fellowships for research related to the retrieval and recognition of philosophical works by women and individuals from other marginalized groups from the medieval period through to the early 20th century. Review of applications begins on 15 July 2020.

For detailed information on the fellowships, the application process, and application forms, visit www.newnarrativesinphilosophy.net/post-doctoral-fellowships.html

SSHAP Ninth Annual Meeting Rescheduled: 14-16 July 2021, at University of Vienna

Annual Meetings, Meetings, News

We are very happy to announce that the Ninth Annual SSHAP Meeting will take place at the University of Vienna on 14-16 July 2021. For more information please visit the conference website: https://sshapvienna2020.univie.ac.at Further details, including the schedule of events and modes of participation will be posted here as they become finalized.

Once again we thank Georg Schiemer, Florian Kolowrat, and the rest of the local organizing team for making this possible. We also thank the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vienna, the Institute Vienna Circle, and the Vienna Circle Society “Society for the Advancement of the Scientific World Conception,” for sponsoring our Meeting.

Davidson’s Wittgenstein

jhap, News, , , , , , , ,

Volume 8.5 of The Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy (JHAP) has now been published online, with full open-access.

It features an article by Ali Hossein Khani entitled, “Davidson’s Wittgenstein”. Here is an abstract:

Although the later Wittgenstein appears as one of the most influential figures in Davidson’s later works on meaning, it is not, for the most part, clear how Davidson interprets and employs Wittgenstein’s ideas. In this paper, I will argue that Davidson’s later works on meaning can be seen as mainly a manifestation of his attempt to accommodate the later Wittgenstein’s basic ideas about meaning and understanding, especially the requirement of drawing the seems right/is right distinction and the way this requirement must be met. These ideas, however, are interpreted by Davidson in his own way. I will then argue that Davidson even attempts to respect Wittgenstein’s quietism, provided that we understand this view in the way Davidson does. Having argued for that, I will finally investigate whether, for Davidson at least, his more theoretical and supposedly explanatory projects, such as that of constructing a formal theory of meaning and his use of the notion of triangulation, are in conflict with this Wittgensteinian quietist view.

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