EUROPEAN SOCIETY FOR ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY
NEWSLETTER No. 1
ESAP is pleased to present you with the first issue of its Newsletter. The Newsletter aims at informing ESAP members on events in the analytic community in Europe. We are setting up an ESAP network of correspondents all over Europe. If you wish to let us know about activities you or your department are planning (conferences, seminars, workshops, and the like) or about important philosophical events that have recently taken place, please contact either your national correspondent or the newsletter editor (see e-mail addresses below). For longer reports, as well as for urgent news, the Local organizing team at Maribor is preparing an electronic bulletin and a homepage. We will keep you informed as we proceed.
Nenad Miscevic, President of ESAP Elisabeth Pacherie, Editor of the Newsletter
Correspondents of the ESAP Newsletter:
Austria: Winfried Loeffler E-mail: Winfried.Loeffler@uibk.ac.at
Czech Republic: James Hill E-mail: phil@earn.cvut.cz
Germany: Michael Groneberg E-mail: mgroneb@gwdg.de
Great-Britain: Shahrar Ali E-mail: uctymsa@ucl.ac.uk
Italy: Pierdaniele Giaretta E-mail: giaretta@ux1.unipd.it
Spain: Conception Martinez Vidal E-mail: lflpcmav.usc.es
Sweden: Toni Ronnow-Rasmussen E-mail: Toni.Ronnow-Rasmussen@fil.lu.se
Switzerland: Kevin Mulligan E-mail: Mulligan@uni2a.unige.ch
This list of correspondents will shortly be completed. In the meanwhile, for other countries, please contact:
Elisabeth Pacherie Editor of the Newsletter E-mail: esapnews@poly.polytechnique.fr
STEERING COMMITTEE
New ESAP President and Steering Committee
During the Congress a General Assembly of the Society was held at which around 80 people were present. The President reported on Society activities during his period of office, notably forging of the link with Dialectica. It was decided to continue the practice of not charging a membership fee for the Society. Members were encouraged to submit their own and their students' best work to Dialectica for publication.
There was an election for President and Steering Committee of the Society. Nenad Miscevic (Maribor, Slovenia) was elected unopposed as new President. Professor Miscevic pledged to set up a web site with electronic bulletin for the Society to help overcome current communication difficulties, and he also declared his intention to foster analytic philosophy in Central and Eastern Europe (long felt to be desirable by the Society) by setting up a regional division ESAP - Central and Eastern.
After a ballot the following persons were elected to the Steering Committee:
Arda Denkel (Istanbul)
Manuel Garcia-Carpintero (Barcelona)
Samuel Guttenplan (London)
Kevin Mulligan (Geneva)
Julian Nida-Rumelin (Gottingen)
Eva Picardi (Bologna)
Wlodzimierz Rabinowicz (Lund)
Francois Recanati (Paris)
Following the conference a membership drive via the internet brought in several dozen new members: membership currently stands at 1050.
Society records are now being transferred from Leeds to Maribor.
Through this medium I wish to thank members and especially the National Representatives for their support during my Presidency and look forward to the Society flourishing in the years ahead.
Peter Simons
Outgoing President, ESAP
PAST EVENTS
SIFA II
“Philosophy and philosophical analysis, theoretical perspectives and historiographical revisions”
Vercelli, February, 18-21, 1996
The second national conference of the Italian Society of Analytic Philosophy gathered 141 participants, including nine invited speakers. Forty-one papers were given, out of sixty submitted. The conference included sessions on ethics, philosophy of mind, logic and philosophy of language, historiographical revisions, philosophy of politics and philosophy of law.
The title of the conference is indicative of the strong commitment which philosophy still has to historicism in Italy. Indeed it is a well-known and even trivial fact that analytic philosophy studies Descartes and Arnauld -- to take just two examples -- in a different manner from that in which these philosophers are studied by historians of philosophy in Italy and France. However, it may be useful to compare and contrast these different approaches. This was the subject of Emanuela Scribano’s talk, in which she made reference to Robert Sleigh’s distinction between exegetical history of philosophy and philosophical history of philosophy. The former has only as its goal the comprehension of a philosophical text. When an invalid argument is individuated, it is analysed in its historical and linguistic context, so that its meaning is grasped. In contrast, those involved in philosophical history of philosophy study an author or a text only if they present an interesting solution to a problem which professional philosophers consider important. Philosophical history of philosophy sharply distinguishes between good and bad arguments, and when an argument proves to be invalid or unsound, it is no longer worth studying. This latter approach to philosophy treats as irrelevant the history of philosophical problems as well as the philosophical meaning of some (perhaps important) bad arguments. Yet according to Scribano, this approach to the history of ideas does not help one gain an understanding of what X said in its proper context. Still, the construction of (good) arguments, as well as their analysis and evaluation, inspired most of the talks in Vercelli. Among the topics discussed were the following: the relation between theory of meaning and a particular theory of perception; the relation between self-consciousness and proprioception; the relation between truth and justification in fiction; the relation between willing and deciding.
The first of these issues was addressed by Kevin Mulligan who presented a theory of meaning, whose sources are Husserl and Buhler. Mulligan argues that semantic relations are intentional, but their intentionality is based on that of perception. Gianfranco Soldati argued that there is a relation of dependence between the concept of self and proprioception, such that the awareness I have of myself depends on the manner in which I am acquainted with my own body. This view allows one to avoid metaphysical idealism, according to which self-consciousness concerns only facts which are necessarily subjective (and are therefore mental). At the same time, the relation between self-consciousness and proprioception is compatible with a certain kind of epistemic and behavioural immunity to error. Marco Santambrogio addressed the topic of truth in fiction by analysing a paradox which recalls Kripke’s in A Puzzle about belief. Santambrogio argued that, in fiction, the concept of truth does not have the relation with the concept of justification it usually has in non-fictional contexts. More precisely, in fictional contexts, propositions are not objects of assertion; rather, one pretends to give one’s assent to particular proposition. From this it follows that the concept of truth in fiction does not involve the notion of possible worlds and that it is rendered independent of both that of justification and that of belief. Finally, Alfredo Civita maintained that classical decision theories present a distorted picture of the relation between willing and deciding. According to these theories, willing precedes deciding as its mental cause; the one who decides is seen as someone who knows perfectly well what he wants, and consequently act. By contrast, Civita claims that deciding is a mental process, in the course of which the agent shapes his will. Therefore, the content of oneís will is not completely determined before deciding. According to this viewpoint, action does not immediately follow a thought (the thought that something is desirable). Rather, thought follows action: if I have to decide what to do, I decide, and then I try to make up my mind about what are in fact my preferences and goals.
Clotilde Calabi
NATURALIZED SEMANTICS AND ITS METHODOLOGY
Maribor, Slovenia, June 10-15, 1996
The symposium was focused upon Michael Devitt's book Coming to Our Senses: A Naturalistic Program for Semantic Localism. Three important questions get insufficient attention in semantics. What are the semantic tasks? Why are they worthwhile? How should we accomplish them? The central purpose of this book is to answer these "methodological" questions "naturalistically" and to see what semantic program follows from the answers. The approach is "anti-Cartesian", rejecting the idea that linguistic or conceptual competence yields any privileged access to meanings.
Thirty participants from the USA, Canada, England, Australia and Slovenia gave papers on the philosophical and linguistic aspects of semantics. The session on Methodology was dedicated to the methodological approaches in philosophical semantics. Paul Pietroski talked about the consequencies of Fregean semantic thesis; Dorit Bar-On discussed a much heated question about the important contrast between semantic facts and other kinds of empirical facts arguing that the contrast is worth preserving. William Demopoulos contrasted Devitt’s and Dummett’s approaches to semantics and examined these two opposing views. Paul Horwich presented and advocated his own deflationary theory of meaning. Two papers were dedicated to the issues of semantics and linguistics. Peter Ludlow defended a particular version of referential semantics while at the same time time conceding to Chomsky his core assumptions about the nature of language. Michael Devitt discussed the agreements as well as essential disagreements with Chomskian approach to linguistics and semantics.
The papers in the second session discussed different approaches to belief ascriptions: Anne Bezuidenhout criticized Devitt’s rejection of only but mild context-dependence for attitude ascriptions. Kent Bach discussed different puzzles about belief reports. Lou Goble argued that most propositional attitude ascriptions are neither opaque nor transparent. Eugene Mills discussed the thesis that objects of belief are sentences in the head. William Taschek defended the thesis that belief ascriptions are context dependent.
The session entitled “A Priori”, comprised papers by Yagisawa, Miscevic, Rey, Bigelow, King, and Neale. The next six papers were dedicated to the issues of Holism and Localism in the philosophy of language and mind. The last session was on Meaning.
The proceedings of the symposium with Devitt's responses will be published in two issues of Acta Analytica.
Dunja Jutronic-Tihomirovic
ECAP II
The 2nd European Congress of Analytic Philosophy took place on 5-7 September 1996 at the University of Leeds. Over 150 participants from more than twenty countries listened to 120 papers on a wide range of topics. Invited speakers were Hugh Mellor, Mark Sainsbury and David Wiggins. Despite a busy programme there was enough time for a fair discussion of papers and most speakers had a good audience. The most popular areas for papers were, predictably, philosophy of mind and philosophy of language, but there were also strong sections on metaphysics and the history of analytic philosophy. The single most frequently discussed topic was the externalism/internalism debate.
FIFTH KARLOVY VARY SYMPOSIUM ON ANALYTICAL PHILOSOPHY, INTERPRETING DAVIDSON
Karlovy Vary, September 9-14, 1996
This year the subject was the philosophy of Donald Davidson, with particular emphasis on his philosophy of language. Professor Quine gave a public talk and made inspiring contributions to the discussions. Other speakers included Dagfinn Follesdal, Roger Gibson, Anthony Grayling, Paul Horwich, Richard Jeffrey, Ernie Lepore, John McDowell, Nenad Miscevic, Stephen Neale and Eddie Zemach, and Robert Morris.
The vigorous and frank exchange of views and the atmosphere of openness prompted Davidson to give us not only robust defences of his basic positions, but also news of developments in his thinking, retractions of some of his previous arguments, and reflections on the merits of others' understandings of his work. In response to a critique of the "omniscient interpreter" argument by Eddie Zemach, for instance, Davidson disclosed that he already regretted ever having introduced it, and later we were told that the same went for the "swampman". He also now rejects the title "coherence theory" for his position on knowledge.
In Externalisms, which opened the proceedings, Davidson put forward his method of triangulation as a form of externalism preferable to two others - the social externalismof Kripke's Wittgenstein, and the perceptual externalismof Burge.Despite his doubts about the title, Davidson defended the substance of his coherence theory of knowledge. He justified his famous slogan "nothing can justify the holding of a belief but another belief" by arguing that there could be no rational constraint from outside the totality of our beliefs - "beliefs" including perceptual beliefs. In a gripping exchange with John McDowell, Davidson denied the possibility of there being propositions without our having attitudes towards them. McDowell, for his part, accepted that only something drawing upon our conceptual apparatus could be evidence for a belief, but denied that this something must itself be a belief.
Several papers discussed Davidson's views in relation to Wittgenstein. Barry Smith, in a paper which was (in the true spirit of the later Wittgenstein) explorative and openly inconclusive, made us feel the Wittgensteinian worry of how it is that I have transparent knowledge of what I mean - "in a flash" - and the problems of making this phenomenon dovetail with a theory of interpretation of third person meanings. Peter Pagin in "Varieties of Triangulation" showed how in the later version of triangulation Davidson needs the second speaker to make possible the distinction, so dear to Wittgenstein, between using a term correctly and just believing that that is what you are doing.
James Hill
19TH INTERNATIONAL WITTGENSTEIN SYMPOSIUM
Kirchberg am Wechsel, August 18, 1996.
Diligent organisers, Professors Peter Koller and Klaus Puhl from the University of Graz, succeeded in gathering together more than hundred participants, among them some of todayís most distinguished moral and political philosophers (Onora O Neill, David Gauthier, Hugo A. Bedau, Robert E. Goodin, Thomas W. Pogge, and others).
The symposium was primarily, though not exclusively concerned with current issues in political philosophy. A number of topics that lie at the intersection of traditionally conceived moral and political philosophy were vividly discussed. The first group of problems was concentrated around the notion of border as that which, on the one hand, defines individuals as members of (not only political, but also moral) communities, thereby conferring moral status to them, while on the other hand it too often introduces arbitrary limitations on the scope and/or strength of our moral duties and rights. So what a considerable number of authors (O Neill, Oldenquist, Goodin, Koller, Pogge, Follesdal, Steinvorth, and others) were trying to do in their papers was to find a way of reconciliating the fact that people do live in more or less exclusive political communities, with the idea that moral rights and obligations should somehow extend beyond existing political borders.
The second group of questions concerned the issue of war and peace. Over a dozen papers on this particular topic, together with some on the closely related ones (nationalism, national consciousness, secession, and the like) indicated the ongoing philosophical interest in re-assessing predominant moral justifications for war, an interest newly awaken as a reaction to the alleged moral purity of Gulf war and later on nurtured by unfortunate killings in former Yugoslavia, Tchetchenyia, Israel,...
Justice and welfare in society and world order was a third intensively discussed topic. What most of the papers had in common was an attempt to supplement some particular conception of justice (within the state as well as between the states) with a more or less detailed picture of what it would take one to realize it in a less than ideal world of the present. For a start, these exercises in applied political philosophy certainly looked promising enough to motivate further research.
There were many other interesting papers dealing with various issues in normative political theory, normative ethics and applied decision-theory (among others, the moral status of animals, justification of tolerance, democracy, liberalism, rationality of collective action, and the like). The symposium has made us aware of the remarkable increase, during the last few years, of the interest among European philosophers in analytical approach to moral and political issues.
Friderik Klampfer
FUTURE EVENTS
CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENTS
FROM SEMANTICS TO PRAGMATICS.
Problems and theories of reference
Palermo, Italy, March, 22-25, 1997
Tentative list of participants:
Stephen Schiffer, Howard Wettstein, Takashi Yagisawa, Jonathan Berg, Eros Corazza, Jerome Dokic, Paul Horwich, Kevin Mulligan, François Recanati,Andrea Bonomi, Paolo Casalegno, Michele di Francesco, Paolo Leonardi, Ernesto Napoli, Marco Santambrogio, Filippo Costa, Antonino di Sparti, Nunzio La Fauci, Franco Lo Piparo,Gianfranco Marrone, Gianni Puglisi, Gianni Rigamonti, Leonardo Samona, Alberto Voltolini
Information:
Dr. Wanda Tasquier
Presidenza della Facolta' di Scienze della formazione, Piazza I. Florio 24,
I-90139 Palermo, tel.0039/91/6956559, fax 0039/91/321665;
Dr. Alberto Voltolini
Istituto di Filosofia e Scienze dell'uomo, Piazza I. Florio 24, I-90139
Palermo, e-mail: voltolin@cibs.sns.it, tel. 0039/91/6956521, fax 0039/91/6956518
JEAN NICOD LECTURES 1997
The Jean Nicod Lecturer for 1997 is Jon Elster. He will deliver a series of lectures on emotions in Paris in June (Tentative dates: 19, 20, 23 ,24)
For further information, contact François Recanati, e-mail: recanati@poly.polytechnique.fr
CALLS FOR PAPERS
GAP III
“Rationality, realism, revision”
The Third International Congress of the German Society of Analytic Philosophy will take place in Munich, Sept 15-18, 1997.
Main speakers: Onora OíNeill, Hans Kamp, John McDowell, Nicholas Rescher, Wolgang Künne, Martin Hollis, Richard Boyd.
The deadline for submissions is January 15th, 1996 (max. 2000 words, or 7 pp). The deadline for registration is end of April 1997.
Organizers: C. U. Moulines, J. Nida-Rümelin, W. Vossenkuhl
Papers and requests for further information to be sent to:
Michael Groneberg, General secretary of GAP.
GAP, c/o Philosophisches Seminar der Universität Göttingen
Humboldtallee 19 ó 37073 Göttingen
Tel.: 49 551 39 4778 (off.)
e-mail: mgroneb@gwdg.de
SOPHA I
The First International Conference of the Francophone Society of Analytic Philosophy will take place in Caen, May 23-25, 1997.
Invited Speakers include J. Bouveresse, J. Dokic, P. Gochet, P. Jacob, P. Kotatko, D. Laurier, N. Miscevic, K. Mulligan, C. Peacocke, F. Recanati, M. Seymour, J. Skorupski.
Those wishing to submit papers (in all areas of analytical philosophy) should send 4 copies of a summary in French (minimum length 2000 characters and maximum length 5000 characters) no later than January, 15, 1996 to:
Pascal Engel - Département de Philosophie, UFR Sciences de l’homme,
Université de Caen, 14032 Caen Cedex
Tel.: 33 2 31 56 56 74, Fax 33 1 31 56 59 82
For further information contact Pascal Engel
E-mail: engel@poly.polytechnique.fr
20TH INTERNATIONAL WITTGENSTEIN SYMPOSIUM,
"The Role of Pragmatics in Contemporary Philosophy."
Kirchberg, Lower Austria, August 10-16, 1997.
The symposium will consist of the following six sections:
1. Pragmatic Aspects of Applied Logic
2. The Pragmatic Dimension of Language
3. Pragmatic Problems in the Philosophy of Science
4. Pragmatic Approaches in Ethics and in the Theory of Action
5. Pragmatic Philosophers and Pragmatic Systems of Thought
6. Wittgenstein
If you want to participate, please contact (preferably between December 1996 and March 1997):
The Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society
Markt 63, A-2880 Kirchberg am Wechsel, Austria, Europe
Tel/fax: +43 2641 2557
A detailed registration form will then be sent to you. If you return this with the indication that you would like to give a paper, you will receive the guidelines for the submission of papers (deadline: 30 April 1997), along with a list of key words outlining the contents of the sections. Up-to-date information on the next Wittgenstein symposium is obtainable via internet. The Wittgenstein '97 Home Page can be found at: http://www.sbg.ac.at/phs/docs/wittgenstein97.htm
CENT ANS DE PHILOSOPHIE AUTRICHIENNE 1838-1938
Cerisy-La-Salle, 3-10 septembre 1997
(Direction: J.-P. Cometti et Kevin Mulligan)
De la naissance de Brentano, en 1838, un an apres la publication de la Wissenschaftslehre de Bolzano, jusqu'a la veille de la seconde Guerre mondiale, la philosophie autrichienne s'est affirmée comme l'un des pôles les plus novateurs de la réflexion philosophique.
Champs de réflexion: Logique et Langage - Metaphysique - Esprit - Société/Économie - Sciences et Mathématiques - Art
Les différentes contributions - limitées a vingt-six au total- devront necessairement s'inscrire dans l'un de ces champs de réflexion et s'attacher a en explorer historiquement ou systématiquement un ou plusieurs aspects.
La sélection des communications se fera sur la base d'un résumé de 6000-8000 signes (5 pages maximun). Les auteurs préciseront dans quelle mesure ils accepteraient de modifier leur exposé si les contraintes du theme et des autres communications l'exigeaient. Les résumés pourront etre rediges en francais, en anglais ou en allemand. Il sera toute fois recommandé, pendant le colloque, de prévoir une communication en francais chaque fois que cela sera possible.
Les textes seront adressés avant le 31 décembre 1996 a:
J.-P. COMETTI
Université de Provence, Départment de philosophie,
29, avenue Robert Schuman - 13621 Aix-en Provence cedex 1
Tel/Fax (33) 42 22 62 94
Kevin MULLIGAN
Université de Geneve, Département de philosophie,
2, rue de Candolle
CH - 1211 Geneve 4
Tel 705 70 51 - Fax 328 25 66
E-mail: mulligan@uni2a.unige.ch
SEMINAR AND CONFERENCE PROGRAMMES
INTERDISCIPLINARY SEMINAR “MODULAR APPROACHES TO COGNITIVE PROCESSES” - PROGRAMME 1997
Institut des Sciences Cognitives, Lyon, Coordinator: Pierre Jacob
Jan. 16 th Sémantique et psycholinguistique
Speakers: J. Mehler, G. Chierchia
Feb., 20 th Hippocampe, cortex et processus de reconnaissance
Speakers: E. Rolls, M. Meunier
March, 13 th Neurolinguistique et philosophie du langage
Speakers: J. F. Nespoulous, D. Marconi
April, 24 th Théorie de líesprit et schizophrénie
Speakers: C. Frith, J. Campbell
May Neurophysiologie de la vision
Speakers: S. Thorpe, N. Logothetis
June Pragmatique
Speakers: F. Recanati, D. Wilson
For further information, contact Pierre Jacob, e-mail: jacob@poly.polytechnique.fr
PHILOSOPHY PROGRAMME 1997 (One-day conferences)
University of London School of Advanced Study
Jan 24th Individual and community
Main speakers: David Archard, Margaret Gilbert, Keith Graham
Feb 28th The analytic and the a priori
Main speakers: Paul Boghossian, Paul Horwich, Christopher Peacocke
Mar 21st Justice and the family
Main speakers: Diemut Bubeck, Veronique Munoz-Darde
Jun 27th Well-being
Main speakers: Roger Crisp, Joseph Raz
Programme Director Jonathan Wolff
Email j.wolff@ucl.ac.uk
Conference & membership enquiries to: Programme Administrator Shahrar Ali
Email shahrar.ali@ucl.ac.uk
Telephone (0171) 636 8000 ext 5105
Facsimile (0171) 436 2301
Postal address: Philosophy Programme, School of Advanced Study, University of London,
Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU
EUROTOURS
oProfessor Steven Davis (Dept of Philosophy, Simon Frazer University, Canada) is visiting at CREA, Paris, in January 1997 and May-June 1997. His areas of specialization are: philosophy of language, pragmatics, and philosophy of mind.
If you wish to contact him, his e-mail address is: stdavis@poly.polytechnique.fr.
oAfter a three-month stay at CREA, Paris, ProfessorRobert Nozick (Dept. Philosophy, Harvard University) will be in Italy from January to June. Prof. Nozick will be guest lecturer at the Instituto universitario Suor Orsola Benincasa in Naples in February and March. He will also give the “John Locke Lectures” 1996-97 in Oxford.
If you wish to contact him, his e-mail is: nozick@husc.harvard.edu
oProfessor Charles Parsons (Dept. Philosophy, Harvard University) will be visiting professor in Padova for a month from mid-May 1997. He will give a series of lectures and seminars on mathematical structuralism.