Workshop on Brandom's pragmatism

University of Genoa

TOWARDS AN ANALYTIC PRAGMATISM - CALL FOR PAPERS
Workshop on Bob Brandom's recent Philosophy of Language

Genoa April 20-23 2009

call for papers: .doc & .pdf

CALL FOR PAPERS
A Workshop on Brandom's Analytic Pragmatism, and its links to inferentialism.
KEYNOTE SPEAKER: Robert Brandom (University of Pittsburgh)

Introduction
In his 2006 John Locke Lectures, Robert Brandom sets the basis for a view of language whose aim is to reconcile classical pragmatism with the semantic tradition of analytic philosophy. The fundamental idea of Analytic Pragmatism is to investigate the relations between meaning and use in terms of two distinctive pragmatic features: what sorts of practices and abilities one has to possess in order to count as saying something meaningful; and what one needs to say in order to specify those very practices and abilities.
       Analytic pragmatism shares with inferentialism the idea that logical, modal, normative, and intentional vocabularies express a meaning, which is already implicit in material, rather than formal inferences; but, it also provides new insights about empiricism, naturalism, and functionalism in epistemology and their conceptual backgrounds.
    The workshop will focus on the core aspects of Brandom’s latest work, and more generally on topics related to inferentialism, pragmatism, philosophy of language and logic.
    Main reference: R. Brandom, Between saying and doing. Towards an Analytic Pragmatism Oxford University Press, 2008

Organization
The workshop will be preceded by a one-day tutorial focusing on the main lines of Brandom's work. The following days will be dedicated to the contributed papers and lectures by Bob Brandom, who will attend the workshop, discuss the papers, and present three talks.

Abstracts
Those who wish to present a paper, must send an abstract to <tap09@googlegroups.com> by December 31st, 2008.
Abstract must be between 5000 and 7000 characters long and anonymous for a blind review. Identifying information, including the author's name, title of the presentation, home institution and e-mail address must be in the accompanying letter. Abstracts should state the thesis and present the outline of the argument, along with a short bibliography.
    A notice of acceptance will be sent by February 28th, 2009.
    The final version of the papers should be ready by the end of March 2009.
    Each speaker will have 25 minutes for the presentation, and 15 minutes for discussion.

Accommodation
Free Accommodation will be granted to contributors (and possibly to some PhD students who wish to participate without presenting a paper).
    There is no registration fee for those interested in attending the workshop.
Please, send a request along with a curriculum to Cristina Amoretti (cristina.amoretti@unige.it).

Back to the main Webpage
http://www.dif.unige.it/epi/con/tap

Organization Committee

Giorgio Bertolotti (Milano-Bicocca)
Daniele Santoro (Roma-Luiss)
Italo Testa (Università di Parma)
Raffaela Giovagnoli (Roma, Tor Vergata)
Carlo Penco (Università di Genova)

Local Committee

Cristina Amoretti
Carlo Penco
Federico Pitto
Massimiliano Vignolo

Provisional Schedule (see details later)
April 20 (Monday):
presentation of some of the main points of Brandom's program
(for Phd and graduate students)
Aprile 21 (Tuesday):
Brandom's lecture ** Contributed papers
Aprile 22 (Wednesday):
Brandom's lectures ** Contributed papers
April 23 (Thursday)
Brandom's lecture ** Contributed papers

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