The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on April 28th from 2:00-4:00 in-person at the Graduate Center (Room 7395) for a talk by Claudine Verheggen (York, CA).

Title: Wittgenstein’s response to Kripke’s Wittgenstein

Abstract: In response to the sceptical problem he found in the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Saul Kripke argued that the only possible rejoinder was a sceptical solution. He did not consider what I take to be Wittgenstein’s way out, which is to dissolve the problem, showing that the sceptic’s conception of what it is for words to have meaning is misguided and therefore the sceptical problem unmotivated. Both sceptical solution and dissolution are committed to semantic non-reductionism. But I do not think that both are committed to semantic quietism. I argue that, whereas the sceptical solution can only lead to quietism, as it concedes that the foundational challenge the sceptic has raised cannot be met and thus only descriptive remarks about meaning are forthcoming, the dissolution of the sceptical problem opens up an alternative way of thinking about meaning, a way which generates its own problem, the resolution of which may result in constructive, albeit still non-reductionist, remarks about meaning.

The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on April 21st from 2:00-4:00 in-person at the Graduate Center (Room 7395) for a talk by Jacob McNulty (Yale).

Title: A hole within being: Consciousness as nothingness in the early Sartre

Abstract: Among Sartre’s best-known theses in Being and Nothingness is his claim that the world of experience contains what he calls “négatités,” little pools or pockets of nothingness. The most famous example of a négatité is Pierre, the friend who is absent from the café. Sartre’s conviction that there are négatités all around us has another side, often obscured from view: I mean his (apparent) conviction that we ourselves are a kind of non-being or nothingness. In this paper I try to shed some light on this Sartrean thesis by connecting it to perennial problem in metaphysics concerning the status of holes, shadows or absences — in short, non-beings. However I see more than mere analogy here. Sartre’s view, as I understand it, is that we literally are a type of hole. We are holes in the sense that we are the kinds of nonbeings that require beings as our hosts. More accurately, it is being and not beings that host the holes that we are. Ordinary holes have some particular material thing as their hosts: cheese or fabric. Yet our “host” is not any particular being (cheese or fabric) but being itself: the in-itself [en soi]. 

The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on May 5th from 2:00-4:00 in-person at the Graduate Center (Room 7395) for a talk by Luca Incurvati (ILLC).

Title: On class hierarchies

Abstract: In her seminal article ‘Proper Classes’, Penelope Maddy introduced a theory of classes validating the naïve comprehension rules. The theory is based on a step-by-step construction of the extension and anti-extension of the membership predicate, which mirrors Kripke’s construction of the extension and anti-extension of the truth predicate. Maddy’s theory has been criticized by Øystein Linnebo for its ‘rampant indeterminacy’ and for making identity among classes too fine-grained. In this paper, I present a theory of classes that builds on Maddy’s theory but avoids its rampant indeterminacy and allows for identity among classes to be suitably coarse-grained. For all the systems I discuss, I provide model theories and proof theories (formulated in bilateral natural deduction systems), along with suitable soundness and completeness results.