Gottlob Frege Lectures 2016

Huw Price: Naturalism, Pragmatism and Representationalism

The 2016 Frege Lectures in Theoretical Philosophy will be held by Huw Price at the University of Tartu. The title of this year's lectures is “Naturalism, Pragmatism and Representationalism”. Huw Price is Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge and Academic Director of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER).

There has been much recent interest in a position variously described as global or universal expressivism, or as non-representational pragmatism. For example, in a 2015 interview Allan Gibbard describes his progress to such a view, saying “As I use the term ‘expressivism’, I, like Price and Horwich, am a universal expressivist.” Other enthusiasts for the view, from rather different directions, include Robert Brandom and Simon Blackburn. In these lectures, Price sets out his own motivations for taking such a view seriously, and his conception of what it involves.

Huw Price will deliver three lectures:
27.06 Jakobi 2-336
11.15-12.45 Two Notions of Naturalism
15.15-16.45 Representationalism – From Nihilism to Dualism

28.06 Jakobi 2-336
11.15-12.45 The End of ‘the World’

Frege lectures are rounded off with a public discussion on existential risks between Huw Price and Jaan Tallinn, a founding engineer of Skype and Kazaa. Tallinn is a co-founder of the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (cser.org), Future of Life Institute (futureoflife.org), and philanthropically supports other existential risk research organizations. He is also a partner at Ambient Sound Investments (asi.ee), an active angel investor, and has served on the Estonian President's Academic Advisory Board.

28.06 Jakobi 2-226
16.15-18.00 A Taxi to the Twenty-Second Century – the Cambridge-Tallinn Connection (Jakobi 2 ringauditooriumis)

Supported by the Centre of Excellence in Estonian Studies (European Union, European Regional Development Fund).