Max Kölbel

Universitat de Barcelona

Humanities

After two years of studying various subjects at Freie Universität Berlin and acquiring a taste for analytic philosophy, I enrolled at King's College London in 1991, where I subsequently completed an MA (1992), an MPhil (1994) and a PhD (1997) in Philosophy. My first academic appointment was as a postdoc at the Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas of the UNAM in Mexico City. Later, I held positions at Swansea (UK), Cambridge University (UK), and the University of Birmingham (UK). I have been ICREA Research Professor at the University of Barcelona since January 2008. I am a member of the research group LOGOS (http://www.ub.edu/grc_logos/). My main interests are in philosophy of language, metaphysics, epistemology and metaethics. Since September 2017 I have been on leave from ICREA in order to take a Position as Professor of Analytic Philosophy and Philosophy of Language at the University of Vienna.


Research interests

My research is in the philosophy of language, metaphysics, epistemology and metaethics. I am currently interested in the nature and purpose of semantic theories for natural languages, in the semantics-pragmatics distinction, in the way semantic theories should represent various forms of context dependence (including contextualism/relativism, de se content), in the ways in which language is used to transfer (and possibly generate) knowledge, and in the nature of objectivity.

Selected publications

- Kölbel M 2017, 'About Concerns', in Depraetere I & Salkie R (eds.), Drawing a Line: Perspectives on the Semantics-Pragmatics Interface, Amsterdam: Springer.


Selected research activities

21 November 2017: “Perspectival Content and Fallacies in Metaethics”. Philosophy Department, University of Salzburg.

9–10 November 2017: “What can and should expressivists and relativists say about moral disagreement?”, keynote talk at Value Disagreement, Lisbon, Portugal.

22–3 September 2017: “Perspectival Content and Expressing an Attitude vs. Asserting that One Has It”, keynote talk at PLM4 congress, Bochum, Germany.

29–30 June 2017: “Perspectival Representation and Fallacies in Metaethics”. Foundations and Methods of Natural Language Semantics I. University of Barcelona, Spain.

23–5 June 2017: “Perspectival Representation and Fallacies in Metaethics”. Representation & Evaluation, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.

3–4 June 2017: “Perspectival Content and Expressing an Attitude vs. Asserting that One Has It”. 2nd Relativisms Global Research Network Workshop. Underwood International College, Yonsei University, Song-Do, South Korea.

2–3 June 2017: “Objectivity and Perspectival Content”. Keynote talk, 5th Seoul Philosophy Graduate Conference, Underwood International College, Yonsei University, Song-Do, South Korea.

11 March 2017: Comments on Khoo and Phillips. Contextualism vs Relativism: Empirical Approaches. Columbia University, New York, USA.

10 March 2017: “How is Objectivity Possible?”. New York University, New York, USA.