2010 Graduate Student Philosophy Conference


"Intersections with the Philosophy of Language"

March 5-6, 2010 Schedule:

Friday, March 5th - @ Olin-Sang 101:
3:00pm - Registration/Check-In
4:00pm: “Generics and Two Views on Conceptual Structure”
-- Bernhard Nickel (Harvard University)
6:00pm - Philosophy Conference Dinner @ the Faculty Club Lounge

(There is a $20 charge for the dinner, please RSVP to brandeis.gradphil@gmail.com)

Saturday, March 6th: Breakfast Spread in Olin-Sang at 8:30am


 Olin-Sang 112: Olin-Sang 124:
Session 1: 9:30-10:20 Finessing Ecumenical Expressivism”: Chris Melenovsky (University of Pennsylvania) Commentator: Irami Osei-Frimpong
A Semantic/Pragmatic Distinction for Negative Existentials Does Explain our Intuitions Regarding the Existence of Fictional Characters”: David C. Spewak Jr. (UC, Santa Barbara) Commentator: Jay Brantner
Session 2: 10:30-11:20 Is Legal-Interpretation 'Duty-Free'?: Endicott on Evaluation and the Sources Thesis”: Joshua Crabill (University of Southern California) Commentator: Jessica Bartlett The Predictive Character of Causal Explanations and Fodor's Cross-Context Test”: Adrian Kwek (Harvard University) Commentator: Richard Sandlin
Session 3: 11:30-12:20 Necessary Conditions for Skepticism: A Reconsideration of Stroud's Response to Transcendental Arguments”: Larisa Svirsky (Tufts University) Commentator: Wesley Mattingly What are Impossible Worlds?”: Barak Krakauer (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) Commentator: Nickolas Montgomery
LUNCH: 12:30-1:50
Session 4: 2:00-2:50 War, Responsibility, Language: The Impossibility of Ethics”: Dru Farro (University of Wyoming) Commentator: Derek Leonard Necessary Laws and Chemical Kinds: A Case Study in A Posteriori Necessity”: Nora Berenstain (University of Texas, Austin) Commentator: Daniel Barulli
Session 5: 3:00-3:50 Contrastive Semantics for Deontic Modals”: Justin Snedegar (University of Southern California) Commentator: Holger Thiel Contextualism and Lexical-Conceptual Semantics”: Derek Leben (Johns Hopkins University) Commentator: Lauren Leydon-Hardy
Session 6: 4:00-4:50 Is Ordinary Language Relevant for Epistemology?”: David Rodriguez-Ruiz (SUNY, Buffalo) Commentator: Kevin Lande On Comparing Yacht Sizes: Kripke, Russell, and the Semantics of Comparatives”: C. Daniel Dolson (UC, Santa Barbara) Commentator: Paul Cherlin