Dear All, Next Tuesday (30th) James Cargile, from the University of Virginia, will give a talk entitled 'Knowledge and Definition'.
The meeting will start at 5.15pm and will be held in the Fisher Building of St. John's College in either the Boys Smith Room, the Dirac Room, or the Castlereagh Room. As usual, the speaker will present for no longer than 45 minutes, followed by a discussion until 7.00pm. If you would like to join James for dinner after the talk, then please let me know by noon on Tuesday. The abstract is as follows: Some philosophers (notably, G.E. Moore, T. Williamson) have said that some things, including good, knows, yellow or red (perhaps using italics)are "indefinable" or "unanalyzable"---/_simpliciter_/. These absolute claims are notably different from precisely defined and proven mathematical claims such as Tarksi's Theorem to the effect that "the notion of arithmetical truth is not arithmetically definable" or the proof that material disjunction is definable in terms of material implication but the latter is not definable in terms of the former. I will argue that the absolute claims cited above are obscure, probably irremediably so. Then if time permits, we might try to explain why, and even ask why the matter might be important. Regards, Daniel Brigham Secretary of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge _____________________________________________________ Sent by the CamPhilEvents mailing list. To unsubscribe or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents Posts are archived here: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive
