Confirmed speakers are:
10:30 – 11:00 Coffee/Tea

11:00 – 12:15 Josh Dever (University of Texas at Austin), ‘Surreal Mathematical Foundations’
12:15 – 13:30 Lunch
13:30 – 14:45 Toby Meadows (Aberdeen), ‘Descartes’ Diagonal’
15:00 – 16:15 Stephen Read (St Andrews), ‘Paradoxes of Signification’
16:15 – 16:45 Coffee/Tea
16:45 – 18:00 Gabriel Uzquiano (USC), ‘Higher-Order Modal Logic and Transcendental Psychology’
Registration is free and includes tea and coffee and a buffet lunch. Please email to register by 12th June 2015. Registration is possible after that date but may not include lunch.

Abstracts:
Josh Dever, ‘Surreal Mathematical Foundations’
TBA
Toby Meadows, ‘Descartes’ Diagonal’
TBA
Stephen Read, ‘Paradoxes of Signification’
In his talk to the Joint Session of the Mind Association and the Aristotelian Society in July 2014, Ian Rumfitt drew our attention to a couple of paradoxes of signification, claiming that although Thomas Bradwardine’s “multiple-meanings” account of truth and signification can solve the first of them, it cannot solve the second. Bradwardine’s solution to the paradoxes of truth in his Insolubilia appears to turn on a distinction between the principal and the consequential signification of an utterance. Whereas, for example, Socrates’ utterance of ‘Socrates says something false’ (and nothing else) principally signifies that what Socrates said is false, it only consequentially signifies that what Socrates said is true, as a result of Bradwardine’s claim that an utterance signifies everything that follows from it. Thus Socrates’ utterance is self-contradictory and so simply false and not true. Once this distinction between principal and consequential signification is admitted, however, the second of Rumfitt’s paradoxes bites and seems to leave Bradwardine with no response. Both paradoxes were discussed extensively in the fourteenth century in the decades after Bradwardine’s treatise was written, by Roger Swyneshed, William Heytesbury, Robert Fland and Ralph Strode. We trace the history of the paradoxes through these authors. It is shown that the distinction between the principal and the consequential signification is made not by Bradwardine but by his opponents, and is not required for Bradwardine’s solution to work. In fact, it dissolves on further examination, and the problematic paradox with it.
Gabriel Uzquiano, ‘Higher-Order Modal Logic and Transcendental Psychology’
(This talk is based on joint work with Andrew Bacon and John Hawthorne.) One familiar approach to higher-order logic permits quantification into each grammatical position: quantification into sentence and predicate position, for example, are perfectly legitimate forms of quantification. This results in a well-known Fregean hierarchy of levels, which correspond to different grammatical categories. There are at least two themes one can discern in the development of higher-order logic. In Modal Logic as Metaphysics, Timothy Williamson has recently investigated higher-order logic as a framework for the formulation and evaluation of important metaphysical theses such as the claim that whatever exists, exists necessarily. But another theme explored by early proponents of higher-order logic is the question of how best to respond to a certain family of intensional paradoxes. On a Russellian approach, the response involves ramification: quantification into a given grammatical category is further stratified into different levels. In this talk, we consider the question of how the two themes relate. We suggest that ramification is overkill as a response to the intensional paradoxes: we can make do with a retreat to a free formulation of universal instantiation. But while free logic is commonly used to resist some of the theses advanced by Williamson, we will indicate how the retreat to free universal instantiation is perfectly consistent with the core of necessitism. Finally, we will point to some of the important costs incurred by the proposed response to the intentional paradoxes.