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Tropes and their Role in the Semantics of Natural Language (2006)| shared_uid | 94 |
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| title | Tropes and their Role in the Semantics of Natural Language |
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| type | Séminaire |
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| year | 2006 |
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| start_date | 2006/10/17 |
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| stop_date | 2006/12/19 |
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| schedule | 16h-18h |
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| frequency | hebdomadaire |
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| active | no |
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| summary | Tropes in contemporary philosophical terminology are concrete manifestations of properties such as for example Socrates’ wisdom or the apples’ redness. Tropes (as ‘accidents’, ‘modes’, or ‘abstract particulars’) have played an important role throughout the history of philosophy, going back at least to Plato and Aristotle. But tropes have also received renewed recent interest in contemporary metaphysics, offering new possible solutions to longstanding philosophical problems such as the problem of universals and the relation between individuals and the universals they instantiate. Tropes also play a rather central role in the semantics of natural language, not just as referents of nominalizations like Socrates’ wisdom, but arguably also in the semantics of modifiers, comparatives, and many other constructions. In this seminar we will discuss some of the most important issues of the more recent metaphysical debate surrounding tropes and explore the various roles tropes may play in the semantics of natural language. We will read work of philosophers such as, Campbell, Bacon, Lowe, Mertz, Simons, Strawson, Williams, Woltersdorff and myself. We will also discuss the relation between tropes to closely related ontological categories, such as events, situations, states of affairs, and facts.
Some of the sessions of the seminar will be given by invited speakers from Geneva and other places in Europe.
The seminar will also be preparatory for a workshop on tropes and properties on January 21-22.
suggested reading: J. Bacon:’ Tropes’. Online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.students with some background in metaphysics and / or linguistic semantics, doctoral students, researchers |
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| responsibles | Moltmann, Tessier Cardon |
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