Graham Priest (CUNY) "Objects that are not Objects"
Abstract: When involved in projects concerning language and its limits, a number of philosophers (Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Frege) have been driven to the conclusion that there are certain thing which appear to be both objects and not objects. They have tried to avoid the contradiction by various strategies, such as the apparently desperate one of declaring some of their own assertions to be meaningless. However, a quite different strategy is to accept the contradictions involved. This...
10:45 am – 11:45 am: Alex Anthony (Rutgers) – Taste and Genericity Commentator: Ravi Thakral (St Andrews)
12:00 pm – 1:00 pm: Matt Teichman (Chicago) – Genericity and Quantification Commentator: Joseph Milburn (Pittsburgh)
Lunch
2:00 pm – 3:00 pm: Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga (Cambridge) – The Effect of Context on Generic and Quantificational Generalisations Commentator: John Collins (East Anglia)
Freshmen and sophomores are invited to attend this open house session so that they can learn more about the department from faculty and current concentrators.
The Mind, Brain, & Behavior Graduate Student Steering Committee presents an interdisciplinary conversation between Jesse Snedeker (Harvard Psychology), Gennaro Chierchia (Harvard Linguistics), Gina Kuperberg (Tufts Psychology), and Meredith Rowe (Harvard Graduate School of Education) on the subject of the science of language.
Derek Parfit (All Souls College, Oxford) "Can We Avoid the Repugnant Conclusion?: On the Ethics of Population and Lexical Superiority"
More than thirty years ago, in Reasons and Persons, Parfit sketched out his mere addition paradox, which involved a seemingly repugnant conclusion: that compared with the existence of many people who would all have some very high quality of life, there could be some much larger number of people whose existence would be better, even though these people would all have lives that were barely worth living. This Thursday, Parfit...
Keynote Speaker: Robert Stalnaker, Lawrence S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
We invite submissions from graduate students for a conference hosted by the Philosophy Departments at Harvard University and MIT to be held on April 18th, 2015 at Harvard University. Papers from all areas of philosophy are welcome, and we especially encourage authors from underrepresented groups in philosophy to submit.
The deadline for submission of papers is January 16th...
