The philosophy papers blog is up, with lots of new stuff while I was away in Cleveland.

One final note re my self-congratulatory post from last night. There’s been some discussion about whether having a blog is a good thing or bad thing from the point of view of getting tenure. (This is relevant because it seems that quite a few academic blogs, by which I don’t just mean blogs run by academics, but blogs run by academics focussing on work-related matters, are run by untenured faculty.) Of course, if people can turn blog entries into publications, then they are very good for tenure prospects. I don’t know how well this generalises, but in philosophy at least one easy way to fall into a rut is to stop writing. There’s so much to read and so many interesting people to talk to that it’s very easy to forget to write. Well, it’s easy that is unless you have a blog. I do think it’s quite good advice for untenured philosophers to be writing quite a lot – even if it just is notes to oneself or to the few the proud who may actually want to read your notes to yourself.

Having said that, blogging may return to light pace the next few days because I managed to agree to three different refereeing tasks in the last week, so I have to go back to spending a little more time (carefully) reading rather than writing. (And I’m pretty sure blogging about papers I’m refereeing is pretty poor form, fun as it may be.)