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Details here. Apparently, assistant professor posts in political science have dropped from 716 to 445 this year.

Call for Papers (Updated)

Between Rawls and Religion: Liberalism in a Postsecular World

LUISS University & John Cabot University, Rome

December 16-18, 2010

Speakers include:

Alessandro Ferrara (Rome)
Andrew March (Yale)
David Rasmussen (Boston College)
Johannes Van Der Ven (Nijmegen)
Maeve Cooke (Dublin)
Paul Weithman (Notre Dame)
Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt)
Peter Jonkers (Tilburg)
Samuele Sangalli (Pontificia Univ. Gregoriana)
Sebastiano Maffettone (LUISS)
Stephen Macedo (Princeton)
Tariq Modood (Bristol, tbc)
Theo de Wit (Tilburg)
Micah Schwartzman (Virginia)

The International Research Network on Religion and Democracy (IRNRD), LUISS University, Rome, and John Cabot University, Rome, are pleased to announce an international conference, ‘Between Rawls and Religion: Liberalism in a Postsecular World’, to be held in Rome on December 16-18, 2010.

The conference will bring together scholars in philosophy, sociology, political theory, legal theory, religious studies, and theology to discuss the problematic relationship between religion and politics in contemporary public life. It will focus particularly on John Rawls’ influential treatment of liberalism in pluralist societies and on the challenges posed to such a treatment by the re-emergence of religions in public life and the development of what some have called a postsecular world.

The conference will thus consider such topics as:

• Religion in Rawls
• Political liberalism in a postsecular world
• Religious doctrines and the idea of public reason
• Religions and overlapping consensus
• Liberalism and political theology
• The philosophical and political foundations of postsecular pluralism
• Redefining the relations and boundaries between religion and public life
• Accommodating religious identities in liberal societies

Submission guidelines

A paper suitable for presentation in 20 minutes and a 500-word abstract, both prepared for blind review, should be sent by 1 October 2010 to the following email address: rawlsandreligion@johncabot.edu

Submissions are welcome from graduate students as well as from more established scholars.

Notice of acceptance will be provided by 15 October 2010.

Selected papers will be considered for publication

Publications by the IRNRD include From Political Theory to Political Theology (Continuum, 2010), Discoursing the Postsecular (Lit, 2010), The Future of Political Theology (Ashgate), Church and State: Modernity and Beyond (Continuum), and Extra-European Perspectives on Habermas (Routledge).

Registration fee (includes conference dinner, lunches and refreshments):
Faculty €100, Students €50

Enquiries: rawlsandrelgion@johncabot.edu

This holiday has become increasingly ironic in the plutocratic United States. Ralph Nader has a decent essay to mark the occasion. Brian Leiter

REMINDER: Registration is still open for the

***2010 LOGIC AND LANGUAGE CONFERENCE***

Aberdeen, Friday 24th September - Sunday 26th September, 2010
University of Aberdeen, Northern Institute of Philosophy

Registration: http://www.abdn.ac.uk/philosophy/nip/ll2010/registration.php

The 2010 Logic and Language Conference is the first of a series of conferences co-organised by the Northern Institute of Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen, and by the Centre for Logic and Language of the Institute of Philosophy at the School of Advanced Study, University of London.

Staged every two years, alternating location between Aberdeen and London, this workshop aims at resurrecting the traditional UK Logic and Language conference series and at becoming a prominent feature in the British philosophical calendar.

The Conference is meant primarily as a showcase for young philosophers to present and discuss their best work, but will host keynote speakers as well. This year's keynote speakers are JC Beall (Connecticut), Manuel Garcia-Carpintero (Barcelona/Logos), Graham Priest (Melbourne and CUNY), Greg Restall (Melbourne), Mark Sainsbury (Texas, Austin).
-------------------------------------------

**PROGRAMME**
http://www.abdn.ac.uk/philosophy/nip/ll2010/programme.php

FRIDAY 24 September

14.00 Invited speaker
Greg Restall: Assertion, Denial and the Logic of Definedness

15.00 Coffee Break

15.20 (parallel session)
Simon Hewitt: The Logic of Finite Order
William Bynoe: Kit Fine on the Timeless and the Temporary

16.20
Julien Murzi: Inferentialism and Incompleteness
Nat Hansen: A Slugfest of Intuitions: Contextualism and Experimental Design

SATURDAY 25 September

10.00 Invited speaker
Mark Sainsbury: Varieties of Fiction Operator

11.00 Coffee Break

11.20
Frederique Janssen-Lauret: Consequence and the Fiction Operator
Gerry Hough: Kripke’s Puzzle and the Semantics/Pragmatics Divide

12.20 Lunch Break

14.00
Seyed N. Mousavian: Millianism, Empty Names, and Pragmatics
Alessandro Torza: Identity and Counterfactuals

15.00 Coffee Break

15.20
Alberto Voltolini: Meinongian Empty Singular Terms
Gunnar Björnsson & Alexander Almér: The Pragmatics of Insensitive Assessments

16.20 Invited speaker
Graham Priest: The Self as a Non-Existent Object

SUNDAY 26 September

10.00 Invited speaker
JC Beall: Open Worlds as Fictions Within Fiction

11.00 Coffee Break

11.20
Aldo Antonelli: Non-Reductive Logicism and the Nature of Abstraction
Lee Walters: Fictional Characters, Syllepsis and Systematic Polysemy

12.20 Lunch Break

14.00
Fredrik Haraldsen: Definite Descriptions, Selection & Rigidity
David Etlin: Vague Desire: The Sorites and the Money Pump

15.00 Coffee Break

15.20 Invited speaker
Manuel García-Carpintero: Pretending to Refer: Internal and External Perspectives
ENDS.

I ask periodically, but still don't know. Such a wickedly funny blog! Where else could one go for the wild "Republicans are Perverts," or lovely excoriations of "Insta-Ignorance", Michelle Malkin, James Taranto, and other miscellaneous "right-wing crazies"? Dadahead, come back! Brian Leiter

Epistemology & Extended Cognition Workshop University of Edinburgh November 24th 2010 www.philosophy.ed.ac.uk/events/EpistExtendedCog.html

Speakers:
Evan Butts (Edinburgh)
Christoph Kelp (Leuven)
Richard Menary (Wollongong)
Orestis Palermos (Edinburgh)
Tom Roberts (Exeter)
Krist Vaesen (Eindhoven)

All are welcome and there is no registration fee.

This event is funded by The Leverhulme Trust and hosted by the Epistemology and Mind & Cognition Research Groups:

www.philosophy.ed.ac.uk/research/epistemology-at-edinburgh.html
www.philosophy.ed.ac.uk/research/mind-and-cognition-at-ed.html

Any queries about this event should be directed to Duncan Pritchard (duncan.pritchard@ed.ac.uk).

Final Call for Registration

Arché 'Logic or Logics?' Mini-course and Workshop

27 September - 1 October, 2010, University of St Andrews

The Arché 'Logic or Logics?' Mini-course and Workshop are organised by the members of the AHRC funded Foundations of Logical Consequence project. The Mini-Course is intended for graduate students and younger researchers (postdocs and junior faculty) working on related topics. The aim is to provide intensive graduate-level instruction on the latest thinking about pluralism and revision in logic. Topics will include the revision of logic debate, logical pluralism vs. absolutism (or monism), and combining logics. The week will conclude with a Workshop dedicated to contemporary research on the same theme.

The speakers for the Mini-course are:

- JC Beall (University of Connecticut)
- Carlos Caleiro (Instituto Superior Técnico, Portugal)
- João Marcos (DIMAp / UFRN, Brazil)
- Graham Priest (University of Melbourne/CUNY)
- Greg Restall (University of Melbourne)
- Gillian Russell (Washington University, St Louis)
- Johan van Benthem (University of Amsterdam)

The speakers for the Workshop are:

- JC Beall (University of Connecticut)
- Colin Caret (Arché, University of St Andrews)
- Roy Cook (University of Minnesota)
- Ole Hjortland (Arché, University of St Andrews)
- Greg Restall (University of Melbourne)
- Penelope Rush (University of Tasmania)
- Gillian Russell (Washington University, St Louis)
- Johan van Benthem (University of Amsterdam)

We invite interested parties to register here: http://tinyurl.com/2wtxkp6

For the full programme see the event website here: http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~arche/events/event?id=398

Any further inquiries should be directed to arche@st-andrews.ac.uk

There are a bunch of epistemology events planned in Edinburgh over the coming months. The schedule for our Epistemology Research Group is starting to shape-up, with Michael Lynch kicking us off on October 6th. We’ve also a workshop on Epistemology and Extended Cognition taking place in November, and we’ll be doing another Xmas Epistemology-Fest in December. For all these events, all are welcome and there’s no registration fee, so if you’re in the Edinburgh area do come along.

I've put a new paper online: "Actuality and Knowability". This is a short paper with an argument from five antecedently plausible premises for the conclusion that there are instances of p iff actually p that are not knowable a priori, and indeed not knowable at all. (One takes p to be No-one entertains q, where q is a proposition no-one actually entertains.) This conclusion is surprising, at least to me, as the view that p iff actually p is always knowable a priori is more or less philosophical orthodoxy, and it is a view that I was strongly inclined to hold myself. It has some other surprising consequences. For example, it suggests that knowability is not closed under a priori entailment, and that provability does not entail knowability. In the paper, I offer a diagnosis of the result in terms of the phenomenon I call "semantic fragility", and I explore some options for accepting or avoiding the result. I also draw some tentative morals. For now, I'm inclined to think that some possible morals are (i) that a scope analysis of 'actually' has more going for it than one might antecedently have thought, (ii) that the epistemological properties of sentences and of the propositions they express can come apart in surprising ways, and (iii) that a notion of propositional apriority along the lines of There is an a priori justification for p is in some ways runs deeper than the standard It is knowable a priori that p. The seed for the paper was a remark near the end of my 2006 reply to Soames. The argument poses obvious problems for Soames's view of 'actually' (discussed briefly in the current paper), but I've come to think that the underlying phenomenon is of broader relevance. I've been led to think about these matters further by working through issues about sentential and propositional apriority in Chapter 2 of Constructing the World (although I haven't yet incorporated this new material into the chapter) and in note 24 of "Propositions and Attitude Ascriptions: A Fregean Account". I suspect that I haven't yet gotten to the bottom of all this, and any thoughts are welcome. David Chalmers

A non-academic named Interim President? Odd. Brian Leiter

...here. Last year, they wisely ignored some of the vote results in selecting the finalists for review, and I assume they will do the same this year, though it looks to be a pretty good group of posts this year,... Brian Leiter

Modelled on Bloggingheads, the aim here is for higher level philosophical discussion, which the current line-up of discussants (including Tamar Gendler, Eric Schwitzgebel, Craig Callender, Jonathan Schaffer, Joshua Knobe, and others) will certainly provide. Brian Leiter

Details here. Thankfully, Newcastle remains safe . . .

MOVING TO FRONT FROM JULY 20, IN CASE ANYONE WHO (SENSIBLY!) DOESN'T READ BLOGS IN THE SUMMER MIGHT BE INTERESTED I have posted on SSRN a review essay of Brian Tamanaha's interesting recent book Beyond the Formalist-Realist Divide: The Role... Brian Leiter

One can only hope this is a joke, or that the data will be ignored once collected. (We've noted this fiasco-in-the-making previously.) Brian Leiter

...here. Brian Leiter

. . . is here.

Details here, and I'd agree.

Here. This being a high-minded, academic kind of place, let us also pause to remember some of the juvenile reasoning offered by putative intellectuals for the war of aggression against Iraq. Brian Leiter

...you'll want to be aware of this effort to stop Fox-style lies and hate propaganda from migrating north. Brian Leiter