Matjaz, Terry and Charles

Here is a picture of myself, Terry Horgan and Charles Siewert in Dubrovnik August 2008. It was taken by David Chalmers. Myself and Terry have a long lasting collaboration that started with my Fullbright Memphis year 1996. This year (2008) we published a co-authored book Austere Realism with MIT Press. We have several published papers and Oxford UP book chapters. Each year, Terry spends a month with me in Slovenia and surroundings. This year we started epistemic and semantic holism project. Charles Siewert was in Memphis in 2001 at a conference co-organized by myself, Terry and John Tienson, dedicated to Origins of both analytic and continental philosophical traditions; proceedings were published by Southern Journal of Philosophy, edited by me, Terry and John. Charles is an important cognitive phenomenology fellow, a pupil of Searle and Dreyfus.

Upcoming events

This picture taken by David Chalmers in August 2008  goes nicely with announcement of things to happen. First, I am expecting my friend Seppo Sajama to stay with me for a week. He's interested in philosophical dimension of mobbing practices, so he is looking for lawyers related to the labor law. In Slovenia we try to contact Miha Trampuz, an acquaintance of mine and a contract law guy. We will travel to Zagreb to meet a mobbing law person at Cafe Kavkaz next week. I know Seppo for a long time and he was in fact one main influence on me in studying Slovene philosopher France Veber. Last year Seppo with his brother Simo worked in my house digging soil, a nice summer working camp. Seppo was in Portoroz this summer and he is coming to Slovenia again so he can escape finish climate a little bit. A couple of years ago as I was externalist and Seppo was an internalist. We had a project to oppose our views, which  unhappily stayed in fragments only. Now he says he became externalist in the area of the law interpretation. On Wednesday November 19 at 2:40pm Seppo will talk on the topics The Interpretation of Contracts - What Has It Got To Do With Philosophy? in room 14, Askerceva 2, Ljubljana. This is how he preliminarily answers his question: "Maybe not much, but thanks to their training , philosophers are well equipped to tackle its problems. The theory of contract interpretation is a branch of the theory of legal interpretation which is a branch of general theory of interpretation - or hermeneutics, for short. Many doctrines and concepts in the philosophies of language and of mind turn out to be handy, too, when dealing with these problems." Looking forward to hear your talk, Seppo.

   I will myself give a talk on Communication-Intention on Monday November 17 at 11:20am, room 434 Askerceva 2. You can access my paper draft at Clanki/Articles link of my homepage. Here is the summary: "Externalist approaches such as denoting fail to provide a viable theory of meaning because they do not include the world. Theories of communication-intention with their endorsement of aspectual senses seem to be closer to that task. But sense's generality and lack of phenomenology still does not involve the experiential world needed as a support for an account of meaning."  My involvement with theories of communication-intention goes way back, to my PhD ("Zapis in govorica" is the book I published as based on this). In late eighties I had a chance to listen to P.F. Strawson's course in Munich during an entire semester. This last take on things of mine originates from a wider project I sketched together with Terry Horgan during this summer as we stayed together for more than a month in Slovenia, visiting Fribourg Cognitive Phenomenology symposium, CEU Budapest Free Will workshop and then also Consciousness and Thought Dubrovnik symposium of excellence (we presented our Vague Content In Non-Vague World paper there). The sketched project argues from epistemic holism to semantic holism, and for the phenomenology constitutive support. One idea is to attack atomistic and tractable approaches. Terry liked my idea that externalist semanticists do not have any world. Of course, they do not have any experiential world, first of all, but that one matters to their area.

   I met Luca Malatesti during Pecs Hungary symposia where I get repeatedly invited, usually presenting papers written by me and by Vojko Strahovnik (Rorty, Horwich, Putnam are some of these). We found out that we were both good friends of U.T. Place, a nice person and philosopher, originator of identity theory with his Is Consciousness a Process in the Brain? 1956 paper. I encouraged Luca during Schiffer Pecs meeting to elaborate his type identity inspired criticism of Chalmers master argument concerning zombies. Luca promised to present this on Wednesday December 17th at 2:40pm and at 6:50pm room 434 Askerceva 2.

   I am also invited to the Democracy symposium at the University of Second Renaissance at Villa Borromeo in Milano, Italy, end of November. Draft of my paper on this topics is posted on my Clanki/Articles homepage link, and I had many valuable feedbacks from my students on this topics. My elaboration is based upon approach of  Tom Christiano, a distinguished philosophy of politics scholar, with whom I spent a week at the Bled conference on Political Philosophy and Ethics that I co-organized, in June 2008. June 2009 there will be a real important Epistemology conference in Bled, Virtue Epistemology and Value, again co-organized by myself. Sosa and other important players  will be there. It promises to be a real exciting event.

Consciousness

Here is a picture of someone that happens not to be dreaming, seems to be awake now. Looks conscious. David Chalmers August 2008. He uses animal knowledge to process all the relevant points in a virtuous conscious flash. Then as the boring presentation of linguistic sort with its  time-consuming harshness starts unfolding he uses dreams. I just wonder whether this would be a kind of hard case for Sosa's distinction between dream beliefs and wake state beliefs. Anyway, his knowledge seems far closer to the transglobal than to the local externalist environment.

Preparing for Virtue Epistemology

This evening there was discussion on virtue epistemology with Weilguny. Here is a remark concerning animal  knowledge and reflective knowledge. It seems that animal knowledge kind of sticks to local environment, where the tendency is goal oriented and atomistic. But some reflective knowledge of KKp brand is needed  to lead us to the real knowledge. One may ask what sort of reflective matter one means by this, and the answer may be something such as evidential consciousness. Now, animal K seems to be measured just by this kind of consciousness. But one would do better to distinguish qualitative phenomenology from reflective consciousness. And it seems that apt skills as the basis of epistemic virtues need exactly qualitative phenomenology. Apt skills as epistemic virtues are cognitive abilities, such as perception, attention, reasoning. They certainly seem to need qualitative phenomenology to get off the ground. The picture published here, of Howard Robinson August 2008, taken by David Chalmers, has nothing to do with all of this; it is just a trial to publish a photo. But in another sense the subject matter corresponds to Sosa's concern to distinguish dreaming beliefs from non-dreaming usual beliefs. In his view these differ from each other, as opposed to the prevalent received view in philosophy and literature. It is hard to see what underlines their difference though: just a feeling of incoherence? Two kinds of K need to be assessed from the angle of environments they involve. Reflective K involves transglobal environment of a narrow nature, whereas animal K involves external local environment. Safety concern should be measured along this angle.