François Recanati - Biography#

Before his recent election at College de France (2018), François Recanati was a CNRS research fellow and a ‘directeur d’études’ at EHESS, as well as the Director of Institut Jean-Nicod, a research lab in philosophy, linguistics and cognitive science hosted by Ecole Normale Supérieure. He taught in many universities around the world, including Berkeley, Harvard, Geneva, and St Andrews. His publications in the philosophy of language and mind include more than one hundred articles, many edited books, and a dozen monographs, including Meaning and Force (CUP, 1987), Direct Reference (Blackwell 1993), Oratio Obliqua, Oratio Recta (MIT Press 2000), Literal Meaning (CUP 2004), Perspectival Thought (OUP 2007), Truth-Conditional Pragmatics (OUP, 2010), Mental Files (OUP, 2012), and Mental Files in Flux (OUP, 2016). In addition to a large number of keynote talks in international conferences, he has given the Pufendorf Lectures (Lund, 2008), the Gareth Evans Memorial Lecture (Oxford 2011), and the Frege Lectures in Theoretical Philosophy (Tartu, 2014). Conferences on his work have been organized in Granada (13th Inter-University Workshop on Philosophy and Cognitive Science, 2003), London (9th BPPA Masterclass on the Philosophy of Language, 2011), Dubrovnik (Philosophy of Linguistics, 2012), Paris (Journées du Répertoire, Sorbonne, 2014), St Andrews (Symposium on Recanati, 2014), and Nantes (Journée Recanati, 2017). He was the first President of the European Society for Analytic Philosophy (1990-93), and the Principal Investigator of a major ERC-funded research project on Context, Content and Compositionality (2009-2013). He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012, and was awarded the CNRS Silver Medal in 2014 and a Honorary Doctorate from Stockholm University (also in 2014). François Recanati belongs to the editorial board of many scientific journals in linguistics and philosophy, and is the general editor of two book series.