The workshop is pleased to announce a special additional meeting on Friday, December 14th, at the usual time, 11.30am, in an unusual location, Stuart 209, in order to discuss recent work by Malte Willer on epistemic modals. Please join us for this our last session of the term!
Author: djagannathan
November 30: Ezra Cook (Northwestern), “Epistemic Modals and Common Ground”
The next meeting of the workshop will be this Friday, November 30, 11.30am-1.30pm, in Harper Memorial 148. Our speaker is Ezra Cook, a graduate student in philosophy at Northwestern University, whose paper is entitled “Epistemic Modals and Common Ground”. Please join us!
November 16: Kristina Liefke (Munich), “A Single-Type Semantics for Natural Language”
The next meeting of the workshop will be this Friday, November 16, 11.30am-1.30pm, in Harper Memorial 148. Our speaker is Kristina Liefke, doctoral fellow at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, and the topic is “A Single-Type Semantics for Natural Language”. For further information see Kristina’s abstract for the talk.
November 9: David Etlin (Philosophy, Groningen), “Vague Desire: the Sorites and the Money Pump”
The next meeting of the workshop will be this Friday, November 9, 11.30am-1.30pm, in Harper Memorial 148. Our speaker is David Etlin, postdoctoral researcher in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Groningen. Dr. Etlin’s talk is entitled “Vague Desire: the Sorites and the Money Pump”. Please join us!
October 26: Timothy Grinsell (Linguistics, UChicago)
The Workshop is pleased to announce its first regular meeting of the 2012-2013 academic year, on Friday, October 26, 11.30am-1.30pm, in Harper Memorial 148. Our speaker is Timothy Grinsell, a PhD student in the Linguistics Department at the University of Chicago. Tim’s talk is entitled “Votes for vagueness: why the English progressive is vague, and what Congress can do about it”. Please join us!
Our full fall schedule is here.
October 5: Planning Meeting (NB: updated time and location)
The Workshop will have its planning meeting for the year on Friday, October 5th, 9.30-10 am in the Linguistics Department Lounge (CL 312). The theme for the year is Vagueness. Regular meetings of the workshop will likely not begin until mid-November due to Hans Kamp’s seminar (see below). Graduate students and others interested in presenting at the workshop this year should write to Dhananjay Jagannathan, the student coordinator, with a topic or title and the quarter in which they’d prefer to present.
We are pleased to announce that Hans Kamp, Professor of Formal Logic and Philosophy of Language at the University of Stuttgart and White’s Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago, will teach a six-week seminar on “Vagueness: its nature, its semantics, its logic”. The seminar meets Mondays, 4.30-7.20p in Cobb 101 and Wednesdays, 11.30a-2.20p in Cobb 304 in weeks 1-6 (beginning October 1st and 3rd and ending November 5th and 7th). A description of the class follows.
LING 50111/PHIL 50111: In this class we will draw together work on vagueness that has been done, over the last forty years, within philosophy, linguistics and formal logic. The overarching aim is to develop a coherent picture of what may appear to be (increasingly) diverging approaches to a single central theme. Among those from whose work we will draw are (in alphabetical, not thematic, order): Dummett, Edgington, Fine, Graff-Fara, Greenough, Raffman, Shapiro, Van Rooy, Varzi, Williamson, Wright. I will also draw on my own work, distant as well as more recent. Through much of the course the context dependence of vague predicates will play a prominent part. Students enrolled in the course will be expected to write an essay (of about 3000 words), which will be due at the end of the quarter.