Category: Events

The Saul Kripke Center is pleased to announce that James Walsh (Assistant Professor, Philosophy, NYU) will deliver a talk on Friday, May 10th, 2024, from 4:15 to 6:15 pm at the CUNY Graduate Center (Room 9207). The talk is free and open to all.

Title: Modal definability and Kripke’s theory of truth

Abstract: In Outline of a Theory of Truth, Kripke introduces some of the central concepts of the logical study of truth and paradox. He informally defines some of these–such as groundedness and paradoxicality–using modal locutions. We introduce a modal language for regimenting Kripke’s informal definitions and characterize the modally definable sets. Though groundedness and paradoxicality are expressible in the modal language, we prove that intrinsicality–which Kripke emphasizes but does not define modally–is not.

Zoom Access: please follow this link.

The Saul Kripke Center is pleased to announce that C. L. Johnson (PhD student, Philosophy, CUNY Graduate Center) will deliver the tenth Saul Kripke Center Young Scholars Series talk on Thursday, February 22, 2024, from 4:15 to 6:15 pm at the CUNY Graduate Center (Room C197). The talk is free and open to all.

Title: On the existence of all possible worlds

Abstract: Why is there something rather than nothing? In “Why Anything? Why This?”, Derek Parfit canvasses several ultimate explanations for existence and their pitfalls, conceding that the possibility for any cogent answer to the question is unlikely. I nevertheless provide such an explanation first by enumerating foundational assumptions common to most, if not all, explanations. From these assumptions, I argue against two popular views regarding the existence of our world: (1) the existence of a necessary being responsible for our world’s creation and (2) the brute existence of our world. Then, by developing an account against the coherence of nothingness, I critique the possibility of Absolute Nothingness, the view that the simplest reality is one devoid of anything. In so doing, I underscore the difference between ontological and explanatory simplicity, showing that though a finite reality (in either the number of worlds or scope) is ontologically simpler than an infinite one (in both number and scope), such a finitude is explanatorily more complex and arbitrary. I then argue that an unbounded Maximality of infinitely many, spatiotemporally disconnected worlds (the opposite of Absolute Nothingness) is the simplest ground (or default state) for our existence, effectively requiring no further explanation.

The Saul Kripke Center will host a memorial conference honoring Saul Kripke (1940-2022) at The CUNY Graduate Center on May 8th and 9th, 2023. The conference program is available here. Registration for attending in person is not required, but attendees will have to comply with the Graduate Center’s Building Access Policy. Although the conference will be a mainly in person event, a livestream is also available; for this, please register.

The Saul Kripke Center is pleased to announce that a conference celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first publication of Saul Kripke’s masterpiece, Naming and Necessity, will be held at the CUNY Graduate Center on December 12th and 13th. For registration and additional details, please consult https://philevents.org/event/show/103858, the book of abstracts, and the schedule.

Saul Kripke and the Saul Kripke Center participated in a conference and celebration in Hudson, NY (7/19/22-7/22/22) marking the 50th anniversary of the first publication of Naming and Necessity.

Professor Saul Kripke will revisit Naming and Necessity as the keynote speaker at the 2nd Annual Undergraduate Philosophy Conference at NYU on May 1st, 2022. Find details here.  

The Saul Kripke Center is pleased to announce that Michael Hillas (PhD student, Philosophy, CUNY Graduate Center) will deliver the ninth Saul Kripke Center Young Scholars Series talk on Thursday, April 7, 2022, from 4:00 to 6:00 pm (NY time) via Zoom. The talk is free and open to all, but those interested in attending should email the Saul Kripke Center in advance to register if they are not already on the Saul Kripke Center’s mailing list.

Title: Logic is All Skill: A Response to Devitt and Roberts on Adoption

Abstract: In Devitt and Roberts’ “Changing Our Logic: A Quinean Perspective” the authors give a neo-Quinean (in a particular sense of neo-Quinean) defense of adoption in logic. To a degree this is a non-defense – they concede that some may not take them as providing an account of rational adoption, but suggest that this is primarily because skill acquisition is not rational more generally, at least in the manner that we may have been hoping it was. However their work tries to establish that there is a large degree to which adoption is possible. My project here will be a critique of the paper on its own terms, accepting for the sake of discourse the core assumptions of the approach proposed. I will go through the examples that are used by Devitt and Roberts and show that even if their assumptions are accepted, their conclusions do not all follow. The conclusion of these arguments will be that Devitt and Roberts are better off embracing the irrationality of skill acquisition, and the consequence that rational adoption is impossible.

The Saul Kripke Center is pleased to announce that Margaret Gilbert (Melden Chair in Moral Philosophy and Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, University of California, Irvine) will deliver the 5th Saul Kripke Lecture on March 10th, 2022, from 4:00 to 6:00 pm (NY time) via Zoom. The talk is free and open to all, but those interested in attending should email the Saul Kripke Center in advance to register if they are not part of the CUNY Graduate Center’s Philosophy Program or are not on the Saul Kripke Center’s mailing list.

Title: Collective Belief: Kinds, Contexts, and Consequences

Abstract: I focus on collective belief as this has been characterized in my previous work, beginning with my paper “Modeling Collective Belief” (1987), and further refined later. I start by introducing my account of collective belief in its present form, emphasizing its overarching aim, and noting some criteria of adequacy for an account with that aim, which the account satisfies. I then draw attention to an ubiquitous situation that I take to involve the development of a sequence of collective beliefs according to my account, and relate it to some prominent views in pragmatics. In concluding, I discuss some significant consequences of collective beliefs on my account of them.

The Saul Kripke Center is pleased to announce that James Shaw (Associate Professor, Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh) will deliver a talk on Thursday, February 17th, 2022, from 2:00 to 4:00 pm (NY time) via Zoom. The talk is free and open to all, but those interested in attending should email the Saul Kripke Center in advance to register if they are not part of the CUNY Graduate Center’s Philosophy Program or are not on the Saul Kripke Center’s mailing list.

Title: Kripkean Necessities, Imaginative Kripke Puzzles, and Semantic Transparency

Abstract: Kripke (1980) famously argued that some a posteriori statements are necessary when true. I begin by exploring an unusual technique to try to learn these necessities merely through imagination that I call “Semantic Imaginative Transfer”. I explore an idealized instance of this technique which I suggest leads to an imaginative variant of Kripke’s (1979) puzzle about belief. I note that on some widespread assumptions (including that propositional idiom can be maintained in the face of Kripke puzzles), the idealized example restricts the space for accommodating Kripkean necessities to two families of views: familiar, broadly Guise-Theoretic approaches to propositional attitudes, and unconventional and largely unexplored views embracing semantic transparency principles. I briefly review some of the history of transparency principles, make some conjectures as to why they went out of fashion following the work of semantic externalists (including Kripke), and make a plea for exploring the consequences of their adoption. Along the way I note the significance of doing so: the transparency principles render Kripkean necessities a priori.

The Saul Kripke Center is pleased to announce that William Nava (PhD student, Philosophy, NYU) will deliver the eighth Saul Kripke Center Young Scholars Series talk on Friday, October 8, 2021, from 1:00 to 3:00 pm (NY time) via Zoom. The talk is free and open to all, but those interested in attending should email the Saul Kripke Center in advance to register if they are not already on the Saul Kripke Center’s mailing list.

Title: The significance and scope of the adoption problem

Abstract: The adoption problem is an argument purporting to show that certain logical inference rules cannot be rationally ‘adopted’—roughly because one would need to already be guided by the inference rules in question to go about adopting them. In this talk, I’ll first argue that this argument is best understood as showing that certain rules are necessary for adoption of rules in general (where their own unadoptability is then a corollary). I’ll then defend the argument from the objection that the notion of adoption is too narrow for the argument to be relevant to logical debates. Finally, I’ll consider the question of just which rules the argument applies to. I conclude that the argument does not apply to any classical inference rules in full generality, but only to somewhat ad hoc restrictions of some of them. On the other hand, I’ll also show that the argument does apply to the transparent truth rules—or, more precisely, to restrictions of them that suffice to generate paradox. What falls out of these considerations is an ur-logic to which everyone must subscribe on pain of inability to adopt any new rules at all; and which, though quite minimal, is incompatible with classical logic by virtue of including the truth rules.