I’ve considered of submitting something to LOGICA every year since I first presented there in 2007, but so far there has always been something overlapping. This is the case once again, as I’ve been invited to a conference at Tampere at the same time. However, LOGICA is a splendid conference and the location, a monastery at the foot of the mountains that separate Czech Republic and Poland, is wonderful. So the conference is highly recommended for anyone working on formal or philosophical aspects of logic. My own paper didn’t contain a single line of logical notation, so they do welcome non-formal presentations as well.

CALL FOR PAPERS

The Institute of Philosophy, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, announces

LOGICA 2011

the 25th in the series of annual international symposia devoted to logic, to be held at Hejnice (in northern Bohemia, about 2.5 hours from Prague) 20 – 24 June 2011.

Invited speakers are Edwin Mares, Pavel Materna, Krister Segerberg, and Gila Sher

The official language of the symposium is English. The first session of the symposium begins on the morning of June 21. The symposium closes at noon Friday June 24.

Contributions devoted to any of the wide range of logical problems are welcome except those focused on specialized technical applications. Particularly welcome are contributions that cover issues interesting both for ‘philosophically’ and for ‘mathematically’ oriented logicians.

Contributions to Logica symposia are published in The Logica Yearbook series (College Publications). Previous volumes include papers from Nuel Belnap, Johan van Benthem, Melvin Fitting, Bob Hale, Wilfrid Hodges, Jaakko Hintikka, David Lewis, Jeff Paris, Dag Prawitz, Graham Priest, Stephen Read, Greg Restall, Gabriel Sandu, Howard Sobel, Stewart Shapiro and many others.

The fee for the symposium is 400 EUR for participants and 280 EUR for accompanying persons. The fee covers full board and lodging at Hejnice Monastery during the symposium, the conference coach from Prague to Hejnice and back, and (for participants) a copy of the volume containing contributions to the symposium.

If you are interested in presenting a paper at the symposium, please email us a two-page abstract accompanied by a separate sheet with your name, contact address and affiliation by 28 February 2011. MS Word or pdf are the accepted formats. The subject line of email submissions should contain “Logica 2011″ to assure that the mail will not be deleted as spam. Notifications of acceptance will be sent out by the end of March.

Scholars from countries with underfunded academic institutions are invited to apply for a reduction of the conference fee. In exceptional cases the organizing committee may cover the entire fee. Those who wish to apply for the reduction should explicitly state so when submitting their abstract, which should be extended to four pages.

For up-to-date information as well as information about previous events in the series visit: www.flu.cas.cz/logica

For information about the conference site see
http://www.mcdo.cz/index.php?lang=eng .

All correspondence concerning the symposium should be directed to

logica@flu.cas.cz

or to:

Vladimir Svoboda
Chair of the Organizing Committee of Logica 2011
Institute of Philosophy
Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic
Jilska 1, 110 00 Prague 1, Czech Republic
fax: +420-221183321

The second CFP for this conference in St. Andrews just popped up. The speaker list is impressive and the ‘Intuitions and Philosophical Methodology’ project that is organizing the conference is doing some interesting work. They’ve got a slightly different approach from my own, but I’m considering of sending something on conceivability as a methodological tool in metaphysics (understood in a linguistic sense) — I believe that it’s a rather bad tool. It might be nice to visit St. Andrews again, it has been a while…

Methods VI: Ordinary Language, Linguistics, and Philosophy
Conference Notice and Call for Papers
Arché Research Centre, University of St Andrews
Time: 23-25 June, 2011
Location: Arts Lecture Theatre, St Andrews
The AHRC Project on ‘Intuitions and Philosophical Methodology’ at the Arché Philosophical Research Centre will host a major Conference on Philosophical Methodology 23-25 June, 2011, at the University of St. Andrews.

Call for Papers
The conference will include submitted papers. If you are interested in presenting at the conference please submit a CV (1 page) and abstract (up to 500 words) describing the main theses and arguments of the paper by February 15th 2011 to ywc4@st-andrews.ac.uk. Presentations will be approximately 40 mins in length. Successful applicants will be notified by March 15th 2011. See below for details of the conference theme.

Confirmed Speakers

• Robert Stalnaker, MIT
• Zoltan Szabo, Yale
• David Chalmers, ANU
• Jason Stanley, Rutgers
• Jessica Brown, St Andrews
• Herman Cappelen, St Andrews
• Manuel Garcia-Carpintero, Barcelona

Conference Theme
It has become increasingly popular to claim that the subject matter of philosophy is neither linguistic nor conceptual. In this sense, it has been suggested that the so-called “linguistic turn” was a mistake and the target of philosophy properly conceived is nonconceptual and nonlinguistic (e.g., Williamson, The Philosophy of Philosophy). Despite this, philosophers still routinely appeal to ordinary linguistic use and linguistic theory in constructing and criticising philosophical theories. The contrast between the alleged target of philosophy and continued reliance on linguistic information in solving philosophical questions raises a number of issues which are the focus of this conference. For example:

• How should one best understand the linguistic or conceptual turn and, in particular, is it best understood as concerned with the subject matter, or the methodology of philosophy?
• In what sense, if any, is philosophy’s subject matter non-linguistic and/or nonconceptual?
• If the subject matter of philosophy is nonlinguistic and nonconceptual, how can we make sense of philosophers’ continued heavy reliance on linguistic data as settling philosophical questions?
• Can one draw metaphysical conclusions from the way we represent the world linguistically and conceptually?
• To what extent should philosophical theory be guided by linguistic usage as opposed to other considerations such as theoretical simplicity and naturalness (Lewis, Sider, Weatherson); or, the best relevant science (e.g. the Churchlands, Kornblith)?
• Even when the subject matter of a particular philosophical debate is clearly about language, to what extent should the scientific theory of linguistics be held to determine the answer to this enquiry given the disciplinary differences between philosophy and linguistics?
• Does linguistics have any special relevance to settling philosophical questions, a relevance not had by other empirical disciplines such as cognitive science? How should we respond when we get apparently conflicting results to a philosophical question by appeal to different empirical disciplines (for instance different answers to the question of the relation of knowledge how and knowledge that provided by work in linguistics and cognitive science)?

We are interested both in general considerations of the above and related questions, and in methodologically reflective case studies.

Further Details:
Contact Jonathan (ji10@st-andrews.ac.uk) or Yuri (ywc4@st-andrews.ac.uk) or visit the conference website (http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~arche/events/event?id=401).

Organizing Committee:
Jessica Brown
Herman Cappelen
Yuri Cath
Jonathan Ichikawa

I tend to bookmark some blog posts that I find interesting in the hopes that I’d some day get around to commenting on them on my own blog. Most of the time that doesn’t happen, or by the time I get around to it the posts are quite old. But that doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t be worthwhile to at least point them out, so what follows is a random collection of things that have caught my eye recently, or not so recently!

• Bloggingheads.tv Science Saturday: Problems in Quantum Mechanics. This one is all the way from 2008, but I watched it maybe six months ago. With Sean Carroll and David Albert. It’s kind of introductory, but I at least found the stuff on the many-worlds interpretation quite helpful.
• Certain Doubts How to Think about Infallibility, by Jon Kvanvig. As a thoroughgoing fallibilist who nevertheless thinks that there is a priori knowledge, infallibility is a topic that I’ve sometimes pondered. Kvanvig doesn’t deal with it quite in the manner that I would, but the modal approach discussed is interesting. I’m inclined to think that a search for Cartesian certainty is misguided though.
• Maverick Philosopher Is It Rational to Fear Death? I think it’s healthy to think about death sometimes, but the reasoning in this post according to which the fear of death is irrational doesn’t quite seem right to me. It omits any discussion about the fear of losing one’s subject and claims simply that the fear of being nothing is irrational. On a related note, there is a conference coming up on this topic in Newcastle: Death: Its Meaning, Metaphysics, and Morality.
• Entia et Nomina Rafal gives us a hint about a conference at Bydgoszcz, Poland, entitled Ontological Proofs Today, featuring E. J. Lowe, Richard Swinburne, and others.
• the cookshop Finally something completely different: The Earth as a Floating Egg. The name of an album consisting of some strange soundscapes, drawing inspiration on ancient Finnish and Babylonian myths. I can’t remember where I found the link, but the blog in question looks like a promising place to find exceptional music…

This one isn’t exactly in my area, but since it’s relatively nearby, I’ll post the CFP. The PLM group seems to be massive anyway, so worth keeping an eye on.

*First PLM Conference*
Philosophy of Language and Mind

First PLM Conference
Stockholm University,
16-18 September 2011
http://langmind.eu/conference.shtml

*PLM (Philosophy of Language and Mind)*
PLM is a European network of centers, institutes and departments with a
strong commitment to the philosophy of language and philosophy of mind
(see http://langmind.eu/). PLM was formed 2010 and has the following
members:

- Arché, St Andrews (http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~arche/)
- Department of Philosophy, CEU, Budapest (https://philosophy.ceu.hu/)
- CLLAM, Department of Philosophy, Stockholm University
(http://people.su.se/~ppagin/cllam/)
- CSMN, Oslo (http://www.csmn.uio.no/)
- ILLC, Amsterdam (http://www.illc.uva.nl/)
- Institut Jean-Nicod, Paris (http://www.institutnicod.org/)
- IP, University of London (http://www.philosophy.sas.ac.uk/home.php)
- LOGOS, University of Barcelona (http://www.ub.edu/grc_logos/)
- NIP, University of Aberdeen (http://www.abdn.ac.uk/philosophy/nip/)

*First PLM Conference*
Every two years PLM will organize a conference in the philosophy of
language and philosophy mind area. The first PLM conference will take
place at Stockholm University, Stockholm, 16-18 September 2011. A
selected number of speakers will be asked to contribute a paper in a
following special issue of Synthèse.

Key-note speakers will be:
- Delia Fara, Princeton University
- Hannes Leitgeb, Ludwig-Maximilians University, Münich
- Genoveva Martí, LOGOS, University of Barcelona
- Elisabeth Pacherie, Institute Jean-Nicod, Paris
- Crispin Wright, University of Aberdeen / New York University

*Call For Papers*
The conference welcomes contributed papers in the areas of philosophy of
language (widely construed, including philosophical logic) and
philosophy of mind. Contributed papers will be allocated 40 minutes,
including 10-15 minutes for discussion.

Submission
To submit a proposal for a contributed talk:
1.Compose an email with your name, affiliation, and the title of your talk.
2.Attach a two-page abstract of your talk, anonymized for blind refereeing,
as a pdf file.
3.Send it to: info(a)langmind.eu
5.Deadline: 31 March 2011.
6.Results of the selection will be communicated no later than 31 May 2011.

Only a couple of weeks until the deadline of this conference with a striking title. Unsurprisingly, I like the theme of the conference, but I can’t tell you much about Villanova University, except that it claims to be ‘the oldest and largest Catholic university in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’. Well, Graham Harman as a keynote speaker is also interesting. I might actually be not too far from Pennsylvania in April, but I don’t think I can be bothered to come up with anything…

Villanova University
16th Annual Conference in Philosophy

“The Return of Metaphysics”
April 8-9, 2011

Keynote Speaker: Graham Harman
Department of Philosophy, American University in Cairo

The “end of metaphysics” is a perennial theme in contemporary
Continental philosophy, which has taken many forms, including the
critiques of onto-theology, the metaphysics of presence, and
(phallo)logocentrism, with consequent emphases on philosophical
practices such as textual interpretation, cultural criticism, and
socio-political interventionism. Recently, however, a “return to
metaphysics” has been initiated by movements such as speculative
realism, object-oriented ontology, actor-network theory, non-
philosophy, and others who re-affirm the possibility and even
necessity of (speculative) metaphysical thought.

We invite critical papers on the status of metaphysics in contemporary
philosophy (for example, concerning the possibility of its “end” or
“return”), including its relationship to its precursors in the
philosophical tradition, mathematics, the contemporary natural
sciences, ecological thought, and literature.

Submission Guidelines:
We encourage submissions from faculty and graduate students of
abstracts (300-500 words) or papers (3,000 to 4,000 words). Please
format these for blind review—personal information, such as name,
institutional affiliation, and contact information, should be either
in the body of your email or on a page separate from the rest of your
paper, and not in the paper itself.
Please email your submissions (and any questions you may have) to
villanovaphilosophy@gmail.com by February 1, 2011.