The philosophy papers blog is up. Most interesting paper (to me at least) is Chris Kennedys Towards a Grammar of Vagueness. Best paper title is Frank Arntzeniuss An arbitrarily short reply to Sheldon Smith on instantaneous velocities.
These are the first few sentences from the abstract Crawford Elder has posted this abstract for his book:
This book defends, with qualifications, the ontology of common sense. It argues that, in all ontological strictness, there exist such familiar objects as trees, humans, glaciers and snowflakes; even, indeed, some artifacts. Most contemporary metaphysicians recognize as real only objects far less familiar, and generally objects far smaller, e.g. the microparticles of physics, and some recognize no objects at all, but only “world-stuff”.
Most? As far as I know Cian Dorr is the only prominent metaphysician to recognise only the microparticles of physics as real objects. The rest of the abstract seems targeted against the van Inwagen/Merricks metaphysics that excludes familiar objects, but theres a whiff of straw about the abstract as it stands.
In the abstract for his Stanford entry on Samuel Clarke, Ezio Vailati describes Clarke as the most important British philosopher in the generation between Locke and Berkeley. This seems odd, because last I checked Berkeley wasnt a British, but rather an Irish philosopher. While Ireland was hardly independent at the time Berkeley lived, my impression was that before the Act of Union it was a separate country. And one would hardly describe an American philosopher from that time as British.
On that note, do you think that the mandarin who decided to hold the Blair/Bush summit, designed we should note to plan the occupation of Iraq, in Northern Ireland has a sense of humour?