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Russell, Wittgenstein and Character Russell on Idealism and Pragmatism Russell on Science, Religion and War Arthur Sullivan: Reply to Klement Gregory Landini: Conference Report
| 3RD ANNUAL EARLY ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY CONFERENCE. Brain child of David McCarty (Indiana University) and Gregory Landini (University of Iowa) while at the Munich Conference celebrating 100 years of Russell’s Paradox, the Early Analytic Philosophy Conference convened at Purdue University this year for its third annual meeting. The conference was organized by Christopher Pincock, of Purdue, with support from Rod Bertolet (Chair of Philosophy at Purdue) and Purdue’s College of Arts and Sciences. The theme of the conferences, which aim to include talks by advanced graduate students, is early analytic philosophy. It was a full two days. David Taylor (University of Iowa graduate student) opened the conference with a talk on how to refurbish McTaggart’s often forgotten C-series, a series McTaggart invented to explain the nature of time. Taylor did a nice job explaining why McTaggart’s admittedly obscure thesis teaches important lessons concerning time. David McCarty then discussed Paul du Bois-Reymond’s conception of “completeness”. The historical development of these ideas on formal systems of arithmetic is eye-opening; McCarty never ceases to amaze. Next was William Taschek’s thought provoking paper on Frege’s horizontal and the nature of logic. The paper inspired quite a bit of debate as Frege scholars lined up on different sides of the issues. The keynote address, which followed these three papers, was ‘Quine and the Aufbau’ by Peter Hylton (University of Illinois, Chicago). The paper generated a wonderful discussion of Quine’s philosophy and its departure from Carnap’s Aufbau. I’m still thinking about the many issues that came out in that discussion. The second day began with Christopher Pincock (Purdue) reading a paper on Russell’s multiple relation theory of judgment. Pincock offers an new interpretation that pulls together the work of several current interpretations of the theory. We are eager to learn more of his many interesting ideas in the coming years. Following Pincock, was Andre Carus (University of Chicago) with an exciting discussion of, dare I say, Carnap’s “ontological” development. Investigating the historical papers left by Carnap, Carus explained the very important, and yet often unappreciated, changes occurring in Carnap’s philosophy. Carus also heralded the appearance of a new thirteen volume series, The Collected Works of Rudolf Carnap (Open Court), as well as a companion series called Full Circle: Publications of the Archive of Scientific Philosophy, Hillman Library, University of Pittsburgh. The first volumes in the companion series are Frege’s Lectures on Logic: Carnap’s Student Notes 1910-1914 and Carnap Brought Home: The View from Jena. Also in the series will be Intellectual Autobiography, by Rudolf Carnap, in its original, unabridged form. Gary Ebbs (Illinois) gave an inspired presentation entitled “Quine and Carnap on Truth by Convention.” Ebbs holds that in order to fit logic into a naturalized conception of science, Quine developed a distorted view of Carnap’s conception of truth by convention. Correcting the distortion sheds important new light on Carnap’s philosophy. In the afternoon sessions, the present author offered a new perspective on the relevance of Russell’s type-theory to Carnap’s “Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology” and Quine’s debate with Carnap on ontology. Finally, Chris Tillman (Indiana University graduate student) awakened the audience to a radical new view of the 19th century algebraic tradition in logic and its relevance to Wittgenstein’s tractarian conception of calculation. The conference was run superbly and a very pleasant time was had by all. The open and friendly discussion of issues, despite what are sometimes radical differences of opinion, is refreshing and inspiring. It is hoped that a tradition is developing and the conference on early analytic philosophy will continue next year.[1]
Gregory Landini
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