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The Philosophy Department at UConn is internationally recognized as a top place to do research in a wide variety of areas within philosophy, including: Africana Philosophy, Philosophical Logic, the Philosophies of Mind and Language, History of Philosophy, Aesthetics, Existentialism and Phenomenology, Metaphysics, Social Epistemology, Virtue Theory, Social and Political Philosophy, Philosophy of Race and Racism, and more.

The department is also a leader in public philosophy, with members addressing topics such as the ethics of artificial intelligence, language and genocide, political epistemology, and shifting the geography of reason. Four journals are headquartered here: Journal of Philosophical Research, Journal for the History of Analytic Philosophy, The Philosophical Forum, and the newly founded Philosophy and Global Affairs.

We have instituted the UConn Assistant Research Professor Program, in which we hire three young faculty for three-year terms devoted to research with a light teaching load.

Recent PhDs have secured positions at St. Andrews University, Oxford University, The Naval Post-Graduate School, the University of Delhi, the University of Massachusetts at Boston, the University of Memphis, the University of Iowa, the University of Idaho, the University of Konstanz, Monash University, Yonsei University, Muhlenberg College, Quinnipiac University, the University of Minnesota-Duluth, the Czech Academy of Sciences, the University of California-Merced, TPX Communications, Cambridge Semantics, Sam Houston State University, and Cycorp. The current group of graduate students come from Greece, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, China, Japan, Canada, South Korea, India, Turkey, Pakistan, Germany, Argentina, and the United Kingdom, as well as the U.S.

8/20 ELM: Expression, Communication And Expression Conference

ELM: Expression, Communication And Expression Conference

Saturday, August 20th, 2022

12:00 AM - 11:59 PM

Storrs Campus
TBA

Expression, Language, and Music (ELM) is to be a biennial conference that brings together researchers from linguistics, music theory, anthropology, neurobiology, cognitive science, philosophy, and more, with the aim of integrating recent findings and insights from diverse perspectives concerning, e.g. the significance of emotional expression for both music and language, the importance of systematic structure in both music and language, and the interrelations between expressive, musical, and communicative capacities and their relevance for understanding the emergence of language (in ontogeny and phylogeny). Future conferences may focus more narrowly on a subset of these topics.

We are tentatively scheduling the inaugural in-person meeting of ELM for August 20-22, 2022.

Contact Information: aliyar.ozercan@uconn.edu
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8/21 ELM: Expression, Communication And Expression Conference

ELM: Expression, Communication And Expression Conference

Sunday, August 21st, 2022

12:00 AM - 11:59 PM

Storrs Campus
TBA

Expression, Language, and Music (ELM) is to be a biennial conference that brings together researchers from linguistics, music theory, anthropology, neurobiology, cognitive science, philosophy, and more, with the aim of integrating recent findings and insights from diverse perspectives concerning, e.g. the significance of emotional expression for both music and language, the importance of systematic structure in both music and language, and the interrelations between expressive, musical, and communicative capacities and their relevance for understanding the emergence of language (in ontogeny and phylogeny). Future conferences may focus more narrowly on a subset of these topics.

We are tentatively scheduling the inaugural in-person meeting of ELM for August 20-22, 2022.

Contact Information: aliyar.ozercan@uconn.edu
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8/22 ELM: Expression, Communication And Expression Conference

ELM: Expression, Communication And Expression Conference

Monday, August 22nd, 2022

12:00 AM - 11:59 PM

Storrs Campus
TBA

Expression, Language, and Music (ELM) is to be a biennial conference that brings together researchers from linguistics, music theory, anthropology, neurobiology, cognitive science, philosophy, and more, with the aim of integrating recent findings and insights from diverse perspectives concerning, e.g. the significance of emotional expression for both music and language, the importance of systematic structure in both music and language, and the interrelations between expressive, musical, and communicative capacities and their relevance for understanding the emergence of language (in ontogeny and phylogeny). Future conferences may focus more narrowly on a subset of these topics.

We are tentatively scheduling the inaugural in-person meeting of ELM for August 20-22, 2022.

Contact Information: aliyar.ozercan@uconn.edu
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8/26 Philosophy Graduate Student Orientation

Philosophy Graduate Student Orientation

Friday, August 26th, 2022

09:30 AM - 03:00 PM

Storrs Campus
MCHU 110

Welcome and orientation of new doctoral students. In addition to offering important information on UCONN’s policies, there will be discussions drawing on faculty and students’ experiences of graduate study in the Philosophy Department and the resources on which to draw from across UCONN.

Contact Information: Heather Battaly (heather.battaly@uconn.edu)
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9/9 Philosophy Department Colloquium: Amie Thomasson

Philosophy Department Colloquium: Amie Thomasson

Friday, September 9th, 2022

04:00 PM - 06:00 PM

Storrs Campus
TBD

Amie Thomasson (Dartmouth)

"Starting a step back: Redirecting Metaphysics"

Contact Information: Lynne Tirrell (lynne.tirrell@uconn.edu)
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9/16 Logic Colloquium: Florio, Shapiro, & Snyder: Semantics And Logic; Logic And Semantics

Logic Colloquium: Florio, Shapiro, & Snyder: Semantics And Logic; Logic And Semantics

Friday, September 16th, 2022

11:15 AM - 12:45 PM

Storrs Campus
Hybrid: room t.b.a & Zoom

Join us in the Logic Colloquium for a talk by

Salvatore Florio, Stewart Shapiro, and Eric Snyder:

"Semantics and logic; logic and semantics"

Abstract:

It is widely (but not universally) held that logical consequence is determined (at least in part) by the meanings of the logical terminology. One might think that this is an empirical claim that can be tested by the usual methods of linguistic semantics. Yet most philosophers who hold views about logic like this do not engage in empirical research to test the main thesis. Sometimes the thesis is just stated, without argument, and sometimes it is argued for on a priori grounds. Moreover, many linguistic studies of words like “or”, the conditional, and the quantifiers run directly contrary to the thesis in question.

From the other direction, much of the work in linguistic semantics uses logical symbols. For example, it is typical for a semanticist to write a biconditional, in a formal language, whose left hand side has a symbol for the meaning of an expression in natural language and whose right hand side is a formula consisting of lambda-terms and other symbols from standard logic works: quantifiers ∀, ∃ and connectives ¬, →, ∧, ∨, ↔. This enterprise thus seems to presuppose that readers already understand the formal logical symbols, and the semanticist uses this understanding to shed light on the meanings of expressions in natural language. This occurs even if the natural language expressions are natural language terms corresponding to the logical ones: “or”, “not”, “forall”, and the like.

The purpose of this talk is to explore the relation between logic and the practice of empirical semantics, hoping to shed light, in some way, on both enterprises.

https://logic.uconn.edu/calendar/

All welcome!

Please contact logic@uconn.edu for Zoom log-in information.

Contact Information: logic@uconn.edu
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Philosophy Department

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