I’d like to say the

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I’d like to say the philosophy papers blog has been updated, but there was nothing to add.
Maybe if I’d written another paper. If you missed yesterday’s update, I could always direct you to my new paper on luminosity, but if you’ve seen that, I’ve got nothing to add.

When I’m scanning for new papers sometimes the tracking program discovers changes to pages that aren’t indicative of new papers. Here was one of the more amusing such changes, from Nick Bostrom.

I’m a whole year older than I was merely twelve months ago. [Added March 10, 2003: Today it finally happened, I became 30, i.e. middle-aged. Imagine all the things that I am now officially too old to do. There will be no celebration, no party. Don’t rock the boat, that’s what I say.]

He’s only 30. Hey, I’m meant to be the wunderkind around here! Anyway, he’s wrong about 30 being middle-aged. 30s are the new 20s, or at least they will be in 41 days approximately.

Send Nick a birthday e-card.

I was puzzled by this passage in Ulysses. (It’s from page 184 of the original printing, about 10 pages into Scylla and Charybdis.)

Stephen looked down on a wide headless caubeen, hung on his ashplant-handle over his knee. My casque and sword. Touch lightly with two index fingers. Aristotle’s experiment. One or two? Necessity is that in virtue of which it is impossible that one can be otherwise. Argal, one hat is one hat.

What exactly is Aristotle’s experiment here? Here, apparently, is the passage that Stephen is referring to.

Why is it that an object which is held between two crossed fingers appears to be two? Is it because we touch it with two sense organs? For when we hold the hand in its natural position we cannot touch an object with the outer sides of two fingers.

How is this supposed to work? I tried a few ways to do this experiment from the clues that Aristotle and Stephen gave me, but I couldn’t find any way in which an object seemed like two. I’m generally very suspicious about claims about the representational character of experience – I tend to think that experiences are much shallower than we normally take them to be, and they are treated as representational because of our nature – but here I couldn’t even see how the experience was supposed to represent an object twice over.

I’d like to say the

Posted on by

I’d like to say the philosophy papers blog has been updated, but there was nothing to add.
Maybe if I’d written another paper. If you missed yesterday’s update, I could always direct you to my new paper on luminosity, but if you’ve seen that, I’ve got nothing to add.

When I’m scanning for new papers sometimes the tracking program discovers changes to pages that aren’t indicative of new papers. Here was one of the more amusing such changes, from Nick Bostrom.

I’m a whole year older than I was merely twelve months ago. [Added March 10, 2003: Today it finally happened, I became 30, i.e. middle-aged. Imagine all the things that I am now officially too old to do. There will be no celebration, no party. Don’t rock the boat, that’s what I say.]

He’s only 30. Hey, I’m meant to be the wunderkind around here! Anyway, he’s wrong about 30 being middle-aged. 30s are the new 20s, or at least they will be in 41 days approximately.

Send Nick a birthday e-card.

I was puzzled by this passage in Ulysses. (It’s from page 184 of the original printing, about 10 pages into Scylla and Charybdis.)

Stephen looked down on a wide headless caubeen, hung on his ashplant-handle over his knee. My casque and sword. Touch lightly with two index fingers. Aristotle’s experiment. One or two? Necessity is that in virtue of which it is impossible that one can be otherwise. Argal, one hat is one hat.

What exactly is Aristotle’s experiment here? Here, apparently, is the passage that Stephen is referring to.

Why is it that an object which is held between two crossed fingers appears to be two? Is it because we touch it with two sense organs? For when we hold the hand in its natural position we cannot touch an object with the outer sides of two fingers.

How is this supposed to work? I tried a few ways to do this experiment from the clues that Aristotle and Stephen gave me, but I couldn’t find any way in which an object seemed like two. I’m generally very suspicious about claims about the representational character of experience – I tend to think that experiences are much shallower than we normally take them to be, and they are treated as representational because of our nature – but here I couldn’t even see how the experience was supposed to represent an object twice over.