The other day I told Chris Hill about an idea I had about Williamson’s arguments against luminosity, and in his inimitable manner he was very enthusiastic about it and said I should write it up so I did but I think this is not really the kind of paper he had in mind.
Still, it is a paper of sorts, even if like everything else I do nowathesedays it is adamandantly drafticious. (–That last sentence was ridiculously self-indulgent. –True, but it is sortofkinda making a philosophical point of sorts, and I’ve decided self-indulgence in philosophy’s service is a feature not a bug.)

The hardest part of the paper was coming up with a title. After “Should we Respond to Evil with Indifference?”, I figured I set the bar pretty high. So I started playing with allusions to either luminosity or, more promisingly, margin of error principles. Very revolutionary in epistemology if right. Or even if not. The marginalist revolution. Again. Jevons, Walras and Menger. Jevons – worked in Australia. No real connection there. Walras. I am the. John Paul George Ringo. John Paul. Pope. Pope Timothy. Could there be a heterodox Pope Timothy? Anyway, this was going nowhere fast, so I just settled for Luminous Margins.

Via Matthew Yglesias, I came across this rather old Richard Rorty article about the differences between analytic and Continental philosophy. I’m not much of a historian, so normally I wouldn’t even link to something from the last millenium, but there were some moderately interesting points there. For one thing, Rorty was a little more sympathetic towards my side than I would be towards his. A little. That probably shows how he’s basically a nicer person than I am. But there were some fairly cheap shots mixed in, of which the cheapest was probably this:

Among anglophone philosophers, sheer argumentative ability—of the sort typical of forensic litigators–matters most. It is still most important to be what my Princeton colleagues used to call “quick in the head”. Elsewhere, on the other hand, it is still most important to be learned—to have read a lot, and to have views on how to pull the various things one has read together into some sort of story, a story which draws a moral. That is why non-anglophone students of philosophy on the Continent usually have little problem chatting up, and being chatted up by, students of literature and history. Philosophy graduate students in the US often have a problem doing this.

There’s something to the factual claim here, that philosophers aren’t as good at chatting up English Lit grad students as we used to be. But on the other hand, we’re getting much better at chatting up workers in other disciplines in our curious not-quite-in-the-humanities not-quite-in-the-traditional-sciences boat, especially linguistics but also political science, cognitive science and even psychology. All things considered, this is a pretty fair trade in my opinion. Sometimes fairer than fair.

The presuppositions that people bring to philosophy can be surprising sometimes. Rorty thinks it is a sign of regress that philosophy now considers great books like Counterfactuals that one can read without being even tempted to change one’s life. But you know, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax doesn’t lead its readers to existential transformation either, but that doesn’t diminish one whit its importance.

Via Matthew Yglesias, I came across this rather old Richard Rorty article about the differences between analytic and Continental philosophy. I’m not much of a historian, so normally I wouldn’t even link to something from the last millenium, but there were some moderately interesting points there. For one thing, Rorty was a little more sympathetic towards my side than I would be towards his. A little. That probably shows how he’s basically a nicer person than I am. But there were some fairly cheap shots mixed in, of which the cheapest was probably this:

Among anglophone philosophers, sheer argumentative ability—of the sort typical of forensic litigators–matters most. It is still most important to be what my Princeton colleagues used to call “quick in the head”. Elsewhere, on the other hand, it is still most important to be learned—to have read a lot, and to have views on how to pull the various things one has read together into some sort of story, a story which draws a moral. That is why non-anglophone students of philosophy on the Continent usually have little problem chatting up, and being chatted up by, students of literature and history. Philosophy graduate students in the US often have a problem doing this.

There’s something to the factual claim here, that philosophers aren’t as good at chatting up English Lit grad students as we used to be. But on the other hand, we’re getting much better at chatting up workers in other disciplines in our curious not-quite-in-the-humanities not-quite-in-the-traditional-sciences boat, especially linguistics but also political science, cognitive science and even psychology. All things considered, this is a pretty fair trade in my opinion. Sometimes fairer than fair.

The presuppositions that people bring to philosophy can be surprising sometimes. Rorty thinks it is a sign of regress that philosophy now considers great books like Counterfactuals that one can read without being even tempted to change one’s life. But you know, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax doesn’t lead its readers to existential transformation either, but that doesn’t diminish one whit its importance.

Six new papers on the philosophy papers blog today. One by Karen Bennett on coincident entities, one by Chris Kennedy on ellipsis, and four from the Equality Exchange, including a paper by Peter Vallentyne, one of the subjects of the latest Leiter gossip mailing.

There’s no new papers there, but Wayne Wright’s page contains a link to this blog. Way to please Brian: add a link to his page the same day you add links to The Onion and Out of the Park Baseball.

Yesterday Kai von Fintel credited me with having ‘scooped’ news of a new paper. This was a particularly generous citation on Kai’s part since there’s no way the philosophy papers blog could have the coverage it does of semantics pages if I hadn’t piggybacked on the work Kai himself had done in setting up his resources page. (And there’s no way I could have the coverage of philosophy papers I do without David Chalmers’s directory.) So I don’t really deserve much credit for scoops. On the other hand, Kai already has a note up about Chris Kennedy’s paper – egads, beaten to a story again!