Barbara Partee writes:
I will be part of a small workshop on the Origins of Formal Semantics organized by Rich Thomason at the University of Michigan November 19-21. The other invited participants are Max Cresswell, Hans Kamp, Jeff Pelletier, Martin Stokhof, and Ivano Caponigro.
I will give an opening ‘topic-framing’ talk, and will also be part of a closing panel on UCLA in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Rich, Barbara, and Ivano (who is working on a biography of Montague) earlier worked up a set of questions that were circulated to all the workshop members, including lots of questions about who influenced whom about various topics, the connections among people like Montague, David Lewis, Arthur Prior, Yehoshua Bar-Hillel; counterfactual conjecture questions like how and whether formal semantics would developed if Montague hadn’t lived or hadn’t done any of what he did, as well as what a possible world might look like in which he didn’t die so young.
The program is here: http://web.eecs.umich.edu/~rthomaso/lpw15/program.html
