October 5, 2009

As promised, here is the report from The fourth meeting of the Portugese society for analytic philosophy (ENFA 4), which took place in Évora, Portugal, 17-19 September 2009. Photos from the conference and from around Évora are available in my gallery.

The conference was well organised — all the ones I have attended this year have been, which is a nice change — and the location, some 160km from Lisbon, was lovely. I have been to Portugal once before, to Lisbon, and I quite like the city. It was good to see a bit more of Portugal, but it would’ve been good to spend some more time in Lisbon as well. Anyway, you can hardly complain about the choice of venue, Évora was also very cheap. I was pleased that there was also a guided tour of Évora included in the program, although the guide loved her own voice a bit too much…

The content of the conference was quite good, especially strong were certain papers on philosophical logic, including the interesting keynote, ‘Primary and Secondary Propositions’ by Oswaldo Chateaubriand. The highlight, without doubt, has to be Kit Fine’s paper, ‘Some Paradoxes of Ground’. The presentation was accessible even for someone who has never heard of the notion of ground, but at the same time insightful and interesting. Personally I would have been more interested to hear a paper specifically on the notion of ground (which does exist, and will be published in a forthcoming CUP volume), but even this paper on certain paradoxes that emerge for the notion was extremely interesting.

I won’t go into the details, but Fine has a series of three papers on ground: the one he presented, the one forthcoming in the CUP volume, and one on the logic of ground. Needless to say, these should be on everyone’s reading list when they come out.

My own paper was entitled ‘Metaphysics Is Not About Existence Questions’, a rather half-baked paper on metaontology and a defence of a more ‘Aristotelian’ (or Finean) conception of metaphysical questions as opposed to the predominant Quinean one. I had quite a nice audience, as I was lucky to be scheduled in the very first session, I was especially pleased to see Oswaldo Chateaubriand and Kit Fine there. Pablo Rychter also gave a paper on metaontology in the same session, so we had a good niche there.

I don’t think I will go to the details of any of the presentations this time. The most interesting thing from my point of view was the opportunity to have a chat with Kit Fine anyway, and to confirm his contribution to a project that I’m working on, more of which in due course!

Next stop, EPSA09 in a couple weeks’ time in Amsterdam.

Tags: ENFA, photos, Portugal