October 5: Planning Meeting (NB: updated time and location)

The Workshop will have its planning meeting for the year on Friday, October 5th, 9.30-10 am in the Linguistics Department Lounge (CL 312). The theme for the year is Vagueness. Regular meetings of the workshop will likely not begin until mid-November due to Hans Kamp’s seminar (see below). Graduate students and others interested in presenting at the workshop this year should write to Dhananjay Jagannathan, the student coordinator, with a topic or title and the quarter in which they’d prefer to present.

We are pleased to announce that Hans Kamp, Professor of Formal Logic and Philosophy of Language at the University of Stuttgart and White’s Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago, will teach a six-week seminar on “Vagueness: its nature, its semantics, its logic”. The seminar meets Mondays, 4.30-7.20p in Cobb 101 and Wednesdays, 11.30a-2.20p in Cobb 304 in weeks 1-6 (beginning October 1st and 3rd and ending November 5th and 7th). A description of the class follows.

LING 50111/PHIL 50111: In this class we will draw together work on vagueness that has been done, over the last forty years, within philosophy, linguistics and formal logic. The overarching aim is to develop a coherent picture of what may appear to be (increasingly) diverging approaches to a single central theme. Among those from whose work we will draw are (in alphabetical, not thematic, order): Dummett, Edgington, Fine, Graff-Fara, Greenough, Raffman, Shapiro, Van Rooy, Varzi, Williamson, Wright. I will also draw on my own work, distant as well as more recent. Through much of the course the context dependence of vague predicates will play a prominent part. Students enrolled in the course will be expected to write an essay (of about 3000 words), which will be due at the end of the quarter.