“Identity, Language and Mind: An Introduction to the Philosophy of John Perry” is out now

Check this out:

This just came out and was presented to John at his birthday party at the CSLI, Stanford. I’ll teach a seminar based on this book this term. More later…

 

Gottlob Frege Lectures in Theoretical Philosophy 2012

John Perry: Three Theories of the Attitudes

This year’s Gottlob Frege Lectures in Theoretical Philosophy will be delivered by John Perry. The exact dates are not fixed yet, but it will probably be in the last week of June. These are the topics John will cover:

 

I. Folk-psychology as an amazing Intellectual Accomplishment

• How our lives depend on our “theory” of mind
• Basic categories:  Feelings, cognitions, ideas
• The “Propositional Attitudes”
• Properties of the PAs
• Causal
• Phenomenological
• How we report and describe them

II.  Three theories of the attitudes

• Frege’s Picture of the attitudes:  agents, times, relations, propositions (The Simple Content Picture).
• Fodor’s Picture of the attitudes: agents, times, and mental representations. (The Simple Representational Picture)
• Representations and contents
• The Complex Picture (Cognitions with Contents)

III.  Self-Locating Belief

• Names, Descriptions and Roles
• Role based-”modes of presentation”.
• Roles and Frege’s picture
• Roles and Fodor’s picture
• Roles and the Complex Picture

IV.  Beliefs about the Self

• Primitive self-belief
• Beliefs about the Self
• Self-notions
• Self-notions, buffers, detached notions
• Lewis’s concept of “self-attribution of properties” confuses primitive self-belief and having beliefs about oneself.

V.  The general theory of Content (Reflexive/Referential Theory)

• Indexical content
• Referential Content
• Network Content and empty names

VI.  Reporting Attitudes

• Traditional Problems
• The Crimmins-Perry Theory
• The Thread Theory

 

Guest Lecture by Keith Devlin on “The Philosophy of Real Mathematics” on UT.TV

Here: http://uttv.ee/naita?id=8239 is the lecture that Keith Devlin presented some weeks ago at Tartu. The title of the lecture was “The Philosophy of Real Mathematics”. Enjoy.

 

CfP: Special Issue of Erkenntnis on “Disagreements”

People agree and disagree about a lot of things: what happens around them, what to do, about matters of taste, and, more generally, about world views, values, policies, theories, philosophies, etc. Some disagreements appear to be “faultless” — no party in such a dispute needs to be mistaken. Other disagreements, seem to be “merely verbal”, and perhaps no real disagreements at all. In both cases, philosophers have argued that this diagnosis should lead to deflationism about the subject-matter of the initial (apparent) disagreement. If disagreements about a certain subject matter are faultless, then there are no objective truths about that subject matter; if disagreements about a certain subject matter are merely verbal, then they concern a pseudo-problem. Still some other disagreements seem to involve less what people explicitly believe or think about something than their dispositions to act towards a given goal. This special issue of Erkenntnis is devoted to the varieties of disagreement that arise in different areas of discourse.

The special issue is edited by Teresa Marques (Lisbon) and Daniel Cohnitz (Tartu).

Papers should be emailed to mariateresamarques@campus.ul.pt or cohnitz@ut.ee no later than

April 1st, 2012.

Submissions must be in English and conform to the submission standards of Erkenntnis (please consult the “instructions for authors” here: http://www.springer.com/philosophy/journal/10670#)

All submissions must be prepared for blind review.

 

Two Estonian Science Foundation Grants for Theoretical Philosophy!

Happy New Year! Good news today: theoretical philosophy received two (!) Estonian Science Foundation grants in last year’s competition. The research grants will last from 2012 to 2015. One grant went to Dr. Bruno Mölder and his research group in philosophy of mind, the other went to our research group in philosophy of linguistics & language. For more information on the philosophy of linguistics & language project, see

http://daniel.cohnitz.de/index.php?Linguistic-Reality-and-it-Psychological-Basis