Ludlow (and friends) Live

What's this about?

OK, so my new iPhone 3G has a snazzy application that allows me to post directly to typepad blogs from the phone.  Thus a new blog is born!  And as I begin this on the way to the World Congress of Philosophy in Seoul Korea,  I'm going to live blog that trip.  It's not really about the conference, but more about what I see along the way.  Its my way of letting the little people roll with P. Luddie for the week.  I'm generous that way.

This is probably a mistake.

Update: Since I'm leaving the WCP on the 3rd and in continues until the 6th, I've persuaded Cappelan and Chalmers to download the typepad ap to their iPhones and take up the mantle of bringing the WCP to the masses.

Test Post 1: Chicago, day before departure, the view from my apartment in chicago

hi

 

This is how Chicago area philosophers roll.  But I hear that NYU philosophers have some lovely views of Starbucks and assorted muffin shops.

Test Post 2: Chicago, my apt., night before departure

 

Korea!

Seoul: view from my hotel room.

And the pimp life continues.

Korea : jumbo taxi to octopus restaurant with assorted philosophers

It's alive!!!!

Cheddar Cheese Stanley and J. Pryor luuuv live octopus

 

U R what U eat!

It's even too much for the Rachel and the Herminator!

Opening ceremony!

See below the jump for my as-it-happened summary of the proceedings.

 

Interviewing celebs like Big Brianl

Lunch

 

Jaegwon Kim, Brian Mclaughlin, Congress General Secretary Kihyeon Kim, and Yoon Kim.  This would count as an A list table.  As Jason observed, sitting next to Jaegwon here is like sitting next to Mick Jagger.

Cub reporter Jason interviews Chalmers and Siegel

 

Chalmers shows his amazing intellectual focus

Hana Kim tears it up in the phil/Lang session

Gauker had a pretty good question in this session, and I wasn't clear on how Hanna wanted to address it.  Her thesis is that metaphors are just a reflex of the massively context sensitive nature of natural language and that a compositional semantics for metaphor is possible.  So "John is a wolf" comes to something like "John is a wolf with respect to personality" or "with respect to eating habits" or whatever.  Gauker observed that even after one fixes the relevant "with respect to" category the result still looks like a metaphor.  I wasn't sure if Hana wanted to say that despite Gauker's intuition they were no longer metaphorical or if they were metaphorical and it didn't matter to her thesis that the semantics of metaphor is compositional.

 

The longsuffering audience at phil of lang invited session today

The herminator using 17th century technology

More hermimator

Me

Gabriel Sandu busts out the power point.

Chalmers is sharp as a tack again today.

Lepore talking about words. They exist. Whew!

Lovebirds

Yet more philosophy in the skylounge

Zoltan holds court

We learn that the mind is still extended

Ah, Dave's mind has extended to his iPhone!

Minds extending

Prof. Jong-Ho Ha

 

Asa and Jussi

Vietnamese philosopher Pham Van Duc

 

Session on philosophy In Viet Nam

This session was mostly about how the Vietnamese are opening up to (and wanting to engage in) philosophical discussion with other philosophical traditions.  One theme about viet philosophy that came up was that a lot of it is rooted in a Confucian tradition about how one can be a good public servant.  Another theme was how to deal with the multinational corporations coming in and what that portends for Vietnamese culture.

 

Tran Van Doan

Andrejs Balodis (Latvia) talking about time

Maria Nualnirun (Thailand)

JJ Mahoney's

JJ's

Stll rockin'

My kind of restaurant

The place to hang in building 500

Session on Buddist philosophy

Young-Seop Ko talks about 7th. Century Korean phil Wonhyo

Some explication from the floor

Question from the floor

Not everyone buying the question

Fumihiko Sueki (Japan)

Jun Fujii talking about Kukai's phil of language

Smackdown from the Indian Contingent

The dispute was about whether it made sense for Kukai to say that truth was expressible in language AND endorse esoteric Buddhism and the view that truth is ineffable.  "Ineffable just means that it can't be expressed in language" was the gist of it.  I offered that maybe we need to know more about Kukai's theory of meaning (his theory of meaning seems to be entirely internalist and possibly expressivist).  My intervention prevented the Buddhists from coming to blows.  I'm nothing if not a peace maker.  --PL

 

Bishwanath Sharms Laimayum (India)