I just found a cool new web toy, one I think Ill
have fun playing with all year. Watchthatpage.com
is a free service that tracks whether various websites that you want to monitor
have changed. So I spent part of the weekend (a larger part than Id care to
admit) setting it up to track all the pages linked to on David Chalmerss page
of people with online
papers in philosophy. And Ill report back here on any changes, and comment
on the changes that strike me as particularly interesting.
Three caveats before we go on. First, I removed
from the list any pages that have an onscreen counter, because I couldnt be
bothered getting an email telling me that your website used to have 349
visitors total, and now has 350. There were only half a dozen or so of these,
because most people use Nedstat or
some similar service that counts in the background. Secondly, some people have
structured papers pages, so the front page doesnt change when a new paper is
posted. I only set the system up to track one page per person, so some people
might miss out. Thirdly, I only installed the program to track the philosophy
pages, not the Philosophical individuals in Daves final three categories.
They may be added later.
Anyway, over the weekend four of those pages
changed. Three of the changes werent particularly interesting. Kelley Rosss Proceedings of the Friesian School now has
an even longer and less coherent rant
about how terrible the rest of academia is at the top of its homepage. Rick Grush included some of
his old papers on his papers page. (This isnt to say his papers arent interesting,
but the new papers are all published, so for the purpose of this project,
which is to track fresh philosophy, they arent that relevant.) And Kirk Ludwig posted
his office hours for the semester. 9 to 11 on Monday morning, which means (a)
hes more committed to getting to the office on time on Monday than I would be
if I lived in Florida and (b) he seems to not like students coming to his
office hours.
Which all reminds me of this quote from Brad
DeLongs report on the AEA.
It’s time for you
to tell your story of how Professor F______ was mistaken for a homeless person
by the crowd on a DC Metro subway car. My story? I have no such story. You’re
hallucinating again. It’s time for you to tell your story of how you found a
key book in the library not by looking in the stacks under its call number but
by thinking, Who at this university would be reading this? and finding it by
looking in their library carrel… I prefer my story of how I showed up for
Professor S______s office hours to find eight people and a ninety-minute
backlog in front of me, ducked into a nearby office, called him, apologized
that I wasn’t going to be able to make my appointment in person, and talked to
him for twenty minutes…
If you like conference stories, you really should
read that post, but then if you like academic blogs (and why wouldnt you if
youre here) youre probably reading Brads blog everyday anyway.
Anyhow, back to the major theme. The fourth page to
be updated was Adam Mortons. And this was pretty interesting. Adam built a new
little page with three moral
hints. The first two are worthwhile, but not particularly groundbreaking, (enthymematic)
arguments for vegetarianism and against capital punishments. The third was
quite fascinating. Morton starts by noting that in ancient times, slavery wasnt
only accepted as being morally acceptable, it wasnt widely thought that
slavery needed a moral defence. People were, as he puts it, complacent about
slavery. He then starts thinking what in the contemporary world might our
descendants think we are complacent about. And he thinks its national borders.
I suggest that it
is the institution of citizenship and borders, whereby one of the most basic
factors affecting people’s prospects in life is the location in which they are
born, and which they are nearly always incapable of changing. It is as if we divided the world up into
castes and gave each a more or less favorable place to live, with walls between
the territories of the castes.
As Adam admits, he doesnt have a fully worked out argument here,
but it is a very interesting thought for the day. Enough to make me grateful I
put all that time in tracking two-hundred odd webpages.
If you want to see the raw data from the tracker,
go to http://www.watchthatpage.com/watchChanges.jsp.
Youll need to login. The username is brian_weatherson@brown.edu, and the
password is philosophy. Once youre there you have the ability to
make all kinds of changes to how the tracker is set up, though of course Id
appreciate it if you didnt tinker too much, since it did take a bit of time to
get it to where it is. (The trust I show to my readers is touching, really.) One
exception: if you want to add the remaining sixty or so people from Daves links page
that I havent yet included, feel free to do so!