Nancy

Just got back from the Knowledge and Questions Conference in beautiful Nancy - just east of Paris. In spite of the fact that I had to spend 4 days in Charles De Gaulle Airport on my way back to St. Louis because of Continental Airlines' less than brilliant overbooking policy and bad weather in Newark, I had a really great time. Franck Lihoreau did a fantastic job organizing the conference, and need I say that the food was unforgettable? I learned that Claudine Tiercelin caused something of a revolution in the French University system when she proposed that Russell's work should constitute one of the major components of the comprehensive exam which many French college students need to pass before graduating. Claudine currently holds a visiting position at Fordham University (in addition to her permanent position in Paris). Claudine is well-known for her work on Peirce's logic and is also making important contributions to variouos areas of mainstream analytic. I am a huge fan of Claudine's work on Peirce. She is one of the world's best (if not the best) Peirce scholars.

What else? I finally got a chance to meet Paul Egre (actually, I met him briefly at a book event organized by Hendricks and Pritchard last year in Portland). Paul's paper concerned the question of why wh-clauses embed only under "factive" (or deictic) verbs. Pascal Engel gave a super-interesting talk on the knowledge account of assertion which Timothy Williamson has famously defended, and Ian Rumfitt talked about knowledge and logical consequence. Among other things, he rejected Edgington's suggestion that the consequence relation is one that preserves truth under a priori implication.

Another paper that I rather liked was Maria Aloni's paper on de re attitudes. Maria offered a new 2Dish account of de re attitude ascriptions. As mentioned earlier, a rough draft of my own paper is available here. The papers from the conference are scheduled to appear in a special issue of Grazer Philosophische Studien.