Francois Recanati

François Recanati (born 1952) is a French analytic philosopher and research fellow at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.

He is the son of Jean Recanati and half-brother of militant Trotskyist Michel Recanati. After secondary studies at the lycee Jacques-Decour and the Sorbonne, he received his degree in philosophy in 1974, he later studied at Oxford and the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS), where he became lecturer in the areas of pragmatic linguistics and philosophy of language (1975-1990).

He has taught at various foreign universities, including the University of California, Berkeley, Harvard University and the University of St Andrews.

In 1991, Recanati was named the first president for the European Society for Analytic Philosophy. He would retain this position until 1993.

He has previously taught at the University of California, Berkeley, Harvard University and the University of St Andrews.

Recanati's work is analyzed or commented on in various published works, including:

Jason Stanley of Rutgers University, reviewed Literal Meaning in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. He wrote: " In Recanati (1993, pp. 227-274), he argued that what is intuitively said by an utterance is affected by context in ways that could not be explained by any combination of Chomsky, Montague and Grice (that is, ordinary syntax and semantics, together with Gricean pragmatics). Since the publication of that work, he has been developing this thesis in detail. His arguments for the thesis he calls contextualism are brought together in characteristically clear and concise form in Literal Meaning." Stanley later comments "The problem with Recanati's appeal to circumstances of evaluation to justify incomplete semantic contents is that it is in tension with much of current linguistic research." and sums up: "In this book, Recanati does an extremely impressive job of laying out the interlocking commitments of his favored version of this position. Furthermore, he faces up to these commitments more honestly than almost any other member of the debate."

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