I haven't been blogging much for a number of reasons. One reason is that I have been absorbed in the just published special issue of the journal Mind celebrating 100 years of 'On Denoting'. The issue is edited by my colleague Stephen Neale, who has done an amazing job, including writing a helpful introduction that also serves as a guide to the literature on the subject. I've been very impressed by the quality of the contributions. Ian Proops gave a wonderful lecture in my graduate seminar on the Gray's Elegy passage in my seminar recently, and after that, and reading Nathan Salmon's fascinating paper on it in this volume, I'm starting to think that maybe I can actually stop omitting discussion of it in my seminars. Cartwright, Kaplan, Kripke, and Szabo's contributions have also already been helpful to me in teaching this semester (and I was pleased to see Kripke entering the 'do either Frege or Russell recognize the possibility of metatheory' wars on the correct side!). Editing a volume or special issue of a journal is a selfless and often thankless task, but a volume like this reminds one of what a service to the field it can be.
It also strikes me that this volume is good evidence of the falsity of the claim that there is a serious division between historians of philosophy and (for lack of a convenient label) those who advance philosophical conclusions with no historical premises. It is obvious that a Nietzsche scholar is a historian of philosophy. Since Frege and Russell's major contributions occurred around the same time period and slightly after, it should be obvious that Frege and Russell scholars are also historians. As this volume demonstrates, there are many major contributors to non-historical projects in philosophy who have serious historical research programs.
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