LoPSE

So I was stuck on a bus from Ghent to Sopot for around 20 hours. I had on me my laptop and a bunch of papers to read, among them Leitgeb's What is a self-referential sentence? Critical remarks on the alleged (non-)circularity of Yablo's paradox (2002), Logique et Analyse 177-178, 3-14. It's a fun paper and I really got into it. To the extent that I decided to spend a few hours typing up a note about this stuff. Here is a fairly sketchy first draft. Abstract below. All comments welcome. Abstract. Leitgeb (2002) objects against the clarity of the debate about the alleged (non-)circularity of Yablo's paradox, arguing that there are actually two notions of self-reference and circularity at play. One, on which Yablo's paradox is not circular, is defined via the reference of the constituents of a sentence, and another, on which the paradox is circular, is defined via syntactic mappings and fixed points. More importantly, Leitgeb argues that both definitions aren'...

(or: What to do when you organize/attend a large conference and you don’t like the participants.) So, after a few years it’s the first time I’m back in Poland doing philosophy. It’s the last day of a week-long conference in Warsaw. The congress had around 700 participants and up to 25 parallel sessions. Since I’m already tired of conferences this year, and this one is particularly frustrating, I’m using my lunch break to write a list of things that you can do to irritate conference participants. Some of my examples apply to the VIIIth Polish Philosophical Congress, some come from other conferences I went to this year. So, here we go. If you expect a few hundreds of participants to register within a few hours, the best strategy is to have only one or two persons at the registration desk and tell them to register only one person at a time. To make things even more convenient, either make them register during their 20 minutes long coffee break, or force them to choose between having ...