New Closure Principle

We're in marking season at the moment, that most glorious time of year. The gloom is punctured from time to time by really awful exam scripts that make daft assertions. My colleague Jesper Kallestrup was marking a bunch the other day and came across this gem that I thought I'd share with you:

"According to Duncan Pritchard, Closure is the principle that if P knows Q, and Q entials R, then R knows P too."

It looks as if I've somehow single-handedly invented a new closure principle!

Scepticism @ Edinburgh

For those of you coming to the conference/pre-conference workshop on Scepticism in Edinburgh at the end of this month, I've now posted a very provisional programme for each event on the relevant webpages here and here.

The speakers at the conference are: Michael Williams, Barry Stroud, Quassim Cassam, Marie McGinn, Ralph Wedgwood, Jim Conant and Bob Stern.

The speakers at the pre-conference workshop are: Crispin Wright, Brian Weatherson and Ram Neta.

Registration is now closed for the conference, but if you really really wanted to come, then I guess I could find a way to squeeze you in. There's no registration for the pre-conference workshop (and no charge either)--you just need to let me know you're coming. The pre-conference workshop is meant to feed-in to the Arche Basic Knowledge project.

By the way, there will be lots and lots of epistemology happening in Edinburgh over the next few years. We have plans for workshops and conferences in every year up to 2012. I'll post details about this soon, but in the meantime, a taster: Ernie Sosa has agreed to give the 2009 Nature of Knowledge lecture.

Midwest Epistemology Conference

The 2nd annual Midwest Epistemology Conference is being held at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in October, with an excellent list of speakers. Click here for more details.

Wittgenstein Conference

This is very late notice I know, but the Universities of Bologna and of Modena & Reggio Emilia are hosting a conference on Wittgenstein's On Certainty later this week, with talks by, amongst others, Hans-Johan Glock, Daniele Moyal-Sharrock, Analisa Coliva and myself. More details can be found here.

2009 Episteme Conference: Call for Papers

CALL FOR PAPERS

*Updated June 17th*

EPISTEME: A Journal of Social Epistemology
http://www.episteme.us.com

2009 CONFERENCE: DISAGREEMENT

Episteme will hold its sixth annual conference at Northwestern
University on June 26-27, 2009. The 2009 meeting will focus on the
epistemological significance of disagreement.

Confirmed participants include: Michael Bergmann (Purdue), Stewart Cohen
(Arizona State), Richard Feldman (Rochester), Sherrilyn Roush (Berkeley) and Roger White (MIT).

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES: Papers should be no more than 5,000 words,
including notes and references, and should be prepared for blind review.
Electronic submissions should be sent to David.Christensen(at)Brown.edu
by January 15, 2009. Approximately four papers will be selected from
the submissions for presentation at the conference. The selected papers
will also be published, along with the papers of the confirmed
participants above, in a special issue of Episteme, with David
Christensen as the Guest Editor.

Conference organizers are: Alvin Goldman (Rutgers), Jennifer Lackey
(Northwestern) and David Christensen (Brown).