Speakers at Cornell

We have talks each of the next three Fridays at Cornell.

This Friday April 1 we have Max Pensky of Binghamton University whose talk is titled “On Constitutional Law and Solidarity”.

Next Friday April 8 we have Rae Langton of MIT whose talk is titled “Objective and Unconditioned Value”.

And the Friday after that, April 15, we have Christopher Taylor of Oxford University (currently visiting at Cornell) whose talk is titled “Courage in the Protagoras and Nicomachean Ethics”.

All talks are in Goldwin Smith Hall at 4.30pm. Max Pensky is in room 134 and Rae Langton and Christopher Taylor are in room 142. I hope many people from the area can make these talks.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention two other talks in the Time and Tense seminar.

Next Monday Armin von Stechow will be doing a talk titled “Temporal Orientation of Modals and Covert Temporal Operators” at 4.30 in Goldwin Smith 134.

The Monday after that Peter Ludlow will be doing a talk titled “‘I Resemble Fitz Hugh Ludlow’: Presentism and the Problem of Cross-Temporal Reference”. It is April 11, 4.30pm in Goldwin Smith 134.

And it isn’t in the the philosophy department, but since it is a philosophy talk I should mention that von Stechow is doing another talk, this one on Tuesday April 6 at 4.30, in Morrill 106 called “Anankastic Conditionals”. Here’s the abstract.

bq.. Anankastic conditionals are constructions exhibited by the following paradigm:

a. You have to take the A train if you want to go to Harlem.
b. If you don’t take the A train you can’t go to Harlem.
c. To go to Harlem you have to take the A train.

They express the idea that the consequent is a necessary condition for achieving the goal expressed by the antecedent. The contstruction has been very reluctant to a compositional analysis. We will propose a counterfactual analysis. The truth condition arrived at is this:

d. The nearest worlds where you go to Harlem, are contained in the worlds where you take the A train and the nearest worlds where you don’t take the A train are disjoint from the worlds where you go to Harlem.

We will give a compositional semantics, which derives this.

We will compare our analysis with the analysis of Saeboe, von Fintel & Iatridou and Huitink.