18-20 March 2024

March 18-19: Room 310
March 20: Room 201

Faculty of Arts and Humanities - University of Porto

ALL WELCOME!

TTT / Thought, Things, Truth in the Analytic Tradition: Reflections on Work of Charles Travis

International conference

Keynote Speakers: Charles Travis, Juliet Floyd, Kenneth Westphal, Avner Baz

Following the success of our reading group “TTT: 12 Essays by Charles Travis”, we are very proud to announce the upcoming conference, Thought, Things, Truth in the Analytic Tradition: Reflections on Work of Charles Travis, to be hosted by the Institute of Philosophy (Mind, Language and Action Group), University of Porto, Portugal.

Charles Travis is Visiting He Lin Chair Professor of Philosophy at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China as well as Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at King's College London. He is currently an associated faculty member at the Institute of Philosophy at the University of Porto. 

Charles’s work on the nature of thought, language, logic, perception, and rationality; his respected authority on philosophers such as Frege, Wittgenstein, and Austin; and his on-going dialogs with contemporary scholars, such as Putnam and McDowell, have had a profound influence on philosophical debates across analytic philosophy.

The aim of this conference is to revisit and further explore Charles’s work on these topics and authors. 

We are honored to have Juliet Floyd (Borden Parker Browne Professor of Philosophy; Director, Boston University Center for the Humanities), Avner Baz (Professor and Chair of Philosophy; Tufts University), and Kenneth Westphal (Professor of Philosophy; Bogaziçi University, Istanbul) as plenary discussants. Each discussant will provide an original analysis of some aspect of Charles Travis's work, after which Charles Travis will then have the opportunity to reply in an open discussion forum.

FULL SCHEDULE HERE

// PLENARY SESSIONS: TITLES AND ABSTRACTS

March 18 / Juliet Floyd – “On ‘Rigor’ in Logic” 

Travis takes Wittgenstein to have endorsed a specific conception of the “crystalline purity of logic” (Investigations §§107-108), distinguishable from McDowell’s claim that perception includes “the conceptual” from the start.  Adhering to a Fregean representational, non-psychological notion of “thought”, Travis severs logic’s forms altogether from human acts of predication yet demands that a specific thought be thought on an occasion for the notion of a truth-condition to apply. This entangles him in a discussion of “logical forms” and a “minimax”, open-ended conception of the “domain” of logic on which fixing “what instances a given concept”, “is part of the requirement for entrance”. Without this “occasion sensitivity” we face an “impurity” that is “simply excluded from the domain”.  Travis thus dispatches with a certain picture of “ultimate” logical grounds: concepts are “instanced” or not within the practices of taking one another to be saying something specific, true or false. This cannot be grounded in one realm of conceptual connections determined ahead of time (cf. Leibniz, Putnam and Wittgenstein on rule-following). Travis invokes Wittgenstein’s use of the notion of number to illustrate family resemblance. New domains extend the concept subject to “what we would count as the same phenomenon”, nothing in the concept number necessitating, e.g., whether or not complex or transfinite count. But this matter of “counting as the same or different” involves techniques (plural) and a variety of interests: analogies, symbolical and aesthetic and pedagogical needs, historical settings, feelings, desires and conceptions of rigor.  Travis does not exactly deny this, but he groups under the hat of “occasion sensitivity” all of it, restricting the weight of Wittgenstein’s notion of our Übereinstummingen to the activity of distinguishing particular things to think, true or false.  We shall explore whether Travis’s conception of rigor is, however important, too narrow to capture Wittgenstein’s intent.

March 19 / Kenneth Westphal – “McDowell’s Fly Bottle Revisited”

In 2005 I had the good fortune to meet Charles at the Warwick conference, ‘McDowell: Between Wittgenstein and Hegel’, where I also spoke on McDowell’s views. I was very impressed by Charles’ clarity, acuity and perseverance, and by McDowell’s – shall I say – tenacity. Charles kindly asked me to consider his later paper on these same issues, ‘The Move, the Divide, the Myth and its Dogma’, published together with McDowell’s paper, ‘Travis on Frege, Kant, and the Given’ in 2018. This later exchange brings increased clarity, further highlighting the virtues of Charles’ work, whilst also exhibiting how McDowell has constructed his very own fly bottle from within which he can do no more than refuse others’ efforts to remediate his seclusion. In my diagnostic remarks about McDowell (2018) I shall indicate why I agree so resoundingly with Charles’ views on perceptual judgment and his own masterful diagnosis of McDowell’s blind spots, and examine one central point McDowell insists Travis neglects: Why and how the form of our sensitivity to perceptible objects matters crucially. I argue that McDowell is correct that this matters, incorrect that it matters to Charles’ views, that McDowell’s view is no more than an unsupported, ill-informed suggestion, that Kant’s actual view about the form of our sensory and intellectual sensitivity is vastly different from and supperior to McDowell’s suggestion, and that Kant’s actual view accords with and undergirds Charles’ views about the silence of the senses and our capacities to judge and to identify various spatio-temporal particulars we perceived in our surroundings.

March 20 / Avner Baz – “The Roots of Thought”

Among living philosophers, Charles Travis is the one whose work I’ve found the most fruitful for me to engage with. In this paper, and prompted by Travis’s Précis of Putting Crystalline Purity in its Place, I’d like to extend earlier lines of engagement with his work and weave them together, in order ultimately to suggest that a truly satisfying answer to the question he raises in the Précis—of how a perceptually encountered instance of a generality ‘grounds’ the truth of a thought featuring that generality (9, 12)—requires a more radical break with the Fregean ‘ideal’ of ‘crystalline purity’, or a more thorough dissolution of it, than Travis, if I’ve understood him correctly, has thus far been ready to allow. 

Organization
Manuela Teles and James Grayot
RG Mind, Language and Action Group (MLAG)
Institute of Philosophy of the University of Porto - UIDB/00502/2020
Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT)
Reitoria da Universidade do Porto - Caixa Geral de Depósitos