This Thursday at 4pm in the graduate common room of the Faculty, Luke Cash will give a talk entitled "From Logic to Grammar via the Synthetic A priori". Abstract below.
Michael Potter >From Logic to Grammar via the Synthetic A priori Kant's master problem in the /Critique of Pure Reason/ was to explain how synthetic a priori knowledge is possible. In order to do so, he made a distinction between pure general logic (which he thought was trivial) and transcendental logic. The latter “deals with the laws of the understanding and of reason only insofar as they are referred a priori to objects.” (B81/A57) The task of the Transcendental Deduction was then to explain the validity of these laws. The /Tractatus/ denied the intelligibility of such a project: There is just one logic, which is indeed trivial, and it rules out the possibility of any such thing as a synthetic a priori proposition. I'm going to examine the costs of maintaining such a view, as well as its ultimate failure. I then discuss Wittgenstein's change of mind in 1929 and the connection which he sees between grammar and the limits of experience, a connection which is, I believe, paralleled in Kant. _____________________________________________________ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
