Dear All, This Tuesday, the 8th November, Stacie Friend (Heythrop College, London) will be giving a talk with the title 'Notions of Nothing.' An abstract for the talk is attached below.
Please note that this meeting will take place in the Boys Smith Room, the Fisher Building, St. John's College, beginning promptly at 17.15. As usual the speaker presents their paper for about 30 minutes, with a strict upper limit of 45 minutes, followed by discussion until 7pm. Best, Claire and Owen ABSTRACT: Just as we can use 'Mark Twain' and 'Samuel Clemens' to designate the same person, we can use 'Odysseus' and 'Ulysses' to identify the same character. How is this possible if neither name picks out an individual, let alone the same one? I argue that we can explain this kind of 'co-identification' by appeal to the same mechanisms that explain ordinary reference. As many authors have noted, empty names, like referring names, are embedded in practices of communication that link uses of the names together. It is natural to think that such communicative practices play a central role in accounting for co-identification, but little attention has been devoted to understanding how. I contrast two ways of conceptualising the practices that underpin our uses of names, arguing that the more popular name-centric approach, inspired by Kripke's account of reference-fixing, has difficulty accounting for co-identification by different empty names. I defend an alternative info-centric approach, inspired by Evans's critique of Kripke. Claire Benn and Owen Griffiths Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge If you wish to be removed from the Moral Sciences Club mailing list, please email [email protected]. _____________________________________________________ Sent by the CamPhilEvents mailing list. To unsubscribe or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents
