The philosophy papers blog is updated. There is a fourth preprint from Analysis July 2003. At this rate there’ll be no need for the printed version. Which, of course, there shouldn’t be in this day and age.

Via Kieran Healy, this is a guide to how to read at universities. It recommends, in a word, skimming. As Matthew Yglesias already pointed out, this is awful advice for philosophy students, or profs, who should read everything slowly and often. Matthew links to this (very good) guide to reading philosophy papers by Jim Pryor as some counterevidence. Matthew and Kieran suggest that the phenomenon of expecting students to read a page closely rather than a book skimmingly is distinctive to analytic philosophy. This isn’t quite true, even in local areas. In semantics courses at least, and I imagine syntax courses too, the standard is more like a page than a book. I don’t know what happens in other parts of linguistics, though I wouldn’t be shocked if socio-linguistics, say, was more like sociology than like philosophy.

Not that semantics courses should move more rapidly. If anything, I think they go by too quickly. I spent hours yesterday musing over the correct interpretation of two five word sentences that arose while reading a fascinating paper on only and always. Damon only feeds the pigeons. Many people always leave tips. At this speed, a paragraph or two a day is actually asking quite a bit.

More seriously, I find properly reading one philosophy paper a day about all I can do around other things. Auntie says that I should write less and read more, but I think plagiarised fictional entities are not obviously the best source of wisdom.

This all started because Kieran linked to this interesting blog by Timothy Burke, a history professor at Swarthmore. (The blog is his homepage, which is a pretty exciting idea.) On Burke’s page he has a commencement address he gave a couple of years ago, which has lots of good (and funny) comments, but also several not-always-justified swipes at universities. One of the primary complaints is that universities, as opposed to liberal arts colleges, are too fragmented and don’t allow enough opportunity for interdisciplinary work. This may be true at lots of universities, but it certainly isn’t true at Brown. If anything, Brown goes too far in promoting interdisciplinary work. (At least among faculty – the students of course have no breadth requirements.) For instance, the new-ish brain sciences program is so keen on developing links across departments that they are considering adding some philosophers, including me, to their lists of affiliated faculty. For someone who is a little bit wobbly on the distinction between neurons and synapses before the first cup of coffee in the morning or three, this is pretty exciting!

Enough with this academic nonsense though. The really important question of the day is whether this Timothy Burke is this Tim Burke.