Every once in a while, I give crash-courses, tutorials, and invited lectures. My most recent crash-cours at a summer school was Topics in Philosophy of Language, given for the 23rd European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI) in August 2011 (see here). The aim of the course was to provide a survey of some significant advances in philosophy of language, starting from the early days of Montague, Lewis or Kaplan, when philosophy of language and natural language semantics still formed a unified discipline, itself grounded in logic, to the present days. I have focused on the topic of context-dependence, covering the standard accounts of indexicality (Kaplan and followers), and comparing them to some less standard accounts, such as two-dimensional update semantics (Stalnaker and followers) or situation semantics (Barwise & Perry and followers). I have also discussed certains forms of context-dependence that do not seem to be reducible to indexicality, and examined to which extent they motivate a departure from traditional truth-conditional approaches (as has been defended, on different grounds, within contextualist as well as relativist approaches to semantics).
The slides of the five lectures that compose my ESSLLI course have been made available online at this location.
Ljubljana (Slovenia), the home of the 23rd ESSLLI (2011)