The Contextualism Network is an international network centered on exploring the idea of contextualism and the consequences of contextualism in several domains of philosophy. It was conceived by Sofia Miguens, Charles Travis and David Zapero to undertake a continuing discussion of MLAG’s research agenda, underlying and unifying individual projects and activities.
The first two meetings of the Network took place in 2022, on the topics Contextualism and Action and Contextualism and Epistemology. The topics of the 2023 Meetings are Rationality (march) and Idealism (june-july).The Network is called ‘Contextualism’ for the sake of simplicity – its real focus in on occasion sensitivity (and actually the official titles of the first two meetings in 2022 were, respectively, Action and Occasion sensitivity and Epistemology and Occasion sensitivity).
The Network was conceived around Charles Travis’ work: when Travis conceived of himself as a philosopher of language his position was known as radical contextualism (namely in philosophy of language in disputes with positions such as literalism, minimalism, insensitive semantics).
Such work is to be continued around phenomena of occasion sensitivity now concerning thought, not language. That is the main objective of the whole Network. One challenge is to bring together approaches to phenomena of occasion sensitivity and an interpretation of Frege on logic, thought and language (as in the 2021 volume Frege – The Pure Business of Being True (OUP)).
Septermber 2023, Université de Paris - Sorbonne
The Pure Business of Being Travis (Photo: M G F Martin)
