Optional Prereading

Workshop: Optional Prereading

Participants are not required to study texts before the workshop sessions. And we expect that even those who want to do some reading beforehand will read at most some of the texts from the extensive list below. Feel free to be selective.

In order to get access to the files you need a password, which you will receive after registering at rethinking(at)gmx.net.



Monday, 14:15 h to 18h
Can Metaethics Be Reduced to Practical Reasoning?       

• Primary reading:
  •        Millgram, "Millian Metaethics"
    
• Background reading: Mills Positivism
  •        Millgram, "John Stuart Mill, Determinism, and the Problem of Induction"
  •        John Stuart Mill, "Auguste Comte and Positivism" (Part I)
• Background reading: The usual suspects in metaethics
  •        Moore, Principia (excerpts)
  •        Mackie, Ethics, ch 1
  •        Blackburn, Ruling Passions (excerpts)
  •        Boyd, "How to Be a Moral Realist"
• Background reading on state of nature arguments
  •        Edward Craig, Knowledge and the State of Nature (Oxford UP, 1999)

Tuesday, 14:15 to 18h
The Place of Modal Cognition in Reasoning

• Primary reading:
  •        Millgram, Progressive Necessity
  •        Millgram, Lewis’s Epicycles, Possible Worlds, and the Mysteries of Modality
• Background reading:
  •        Lewis, Counterfactuals (excerpt)
  •        Nichols, Imaginative Blocks
  •        Nozick, Invariances (excerpt)

       

Wednesday, 14:15 h to 18h
Is Logic at the Center of the Web of Belief? The Case of Epistemicism   

•        Oppenheim and Putnam, Unity of Science as a Working Hypothesis
•        Keefe, The Epistemic View of Vagueness
•        Sorensen, Truthmaker Gaps
•        Williamson, Vagueness as Ignorance

Thursday, 10:15 h to 14h
Can the Theory of Reasoning Be Formal? Lessons of Higher-Order Vagueness     

• Primary reading:
  •        Teller, Modeling Truth
• Background reading: A couple of alternative formal approaches to vagueness
  •        Dorothy Edgington, Vagueness by Degrees
  •        Kit Fine, Vagueness, Truth and Logic
• Background reading: Two typical discussions of higher-order vagueness, one taking the formality requirement for granted, one not
  •        Timothy Williamson, "On the Structure of Higher-Order Vagueness"
  •        R. M. Sainsbury, "Concepts without Boundaries"
• Background reading: Warming up for the problem with formal models of higher-order vagueness
  •        Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson), "What the Tortoise Said to Achilles"
  •        Dr Seuss, On beyond Zebra
• Background reading: Why were we so sure that logic is formal?
  •        John MacFarlane, "What Does It Mean to Say That Logic Is Formal?"

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Contact and Queries

Professor Millgram’s assistant for this workshop will be Svantje de Silva from Saarbrücken. Please direct all inquiries, in English or French or German, to her:
rethinking(at)gmx.net