Dear all, A reminder that tomorrow at the final meeting of the Moral Sciences Club of this term, Michael Blome-Tillman (Cambridge) will give a talk entitled 'On Denoting and Referring'. We'll be in the *Barbara White Room*, Newnham college, from 2.30-4.15pm. As always, everyone is welcome to join us for tea in the philosophy faculty after the talk.
We look forward to seeing many of you there. Best wishes, Ali Boyle and Matthew Simpson Michael Blome-Tillman: On Denoting and Referring According to Russell, definite descriptions are existentially quantified noun phrases. Strawson (and Frege) famously disagreed: according to them, definite descriptions such as ‘the F’ are singular terms, and utterances containing them presuppose rather than entail that there is an F. In this paper I argue that the debate between Russell and Strawson rests on a mistaken assumption about the nature and role of presuppositions in natural language. Once we get clearer on presuppositions, which are nowadays mostly understood as conventional implicatures, the dispute evaporates and the way is cleared for what I call ‘Presuppositional Russellianism’---a surprisingly simple yet powerful view that combines the advantages of both Russellian and Fregean theories within a unified semantic framework. -- Ali Boyle and Matthew Simpson Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge [email protected] http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _____________________________________________________ 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.
