No papers blog today because there was nothing to report. Maybe I should stop doing the papers blog on weekends.

I’ve added a new link to the links column on the right – Episteme Links – which is basically a philosophy portal. It seems to be incredibly popular, judging by its stats, and it apparently will soon include a section for philosophy blogs. So maybe we’ll be getting more visitors by sooner or later.

One of the things I found via EpistemeLinks was the British Society for the Philosophy of Sport. (The link appears to be down right now, but it was working yesterday, and presumably will be again shortly.) And via that I found that there is a conference on philosophy of sport to be held at Ohio State in a few weeks. Somewhat depressingly, the conference organisers don’t seem to have got the point about which features of Columbus, OH will be of most interest to philosophers of sport. Here’s what they say about Columbus’s attractions:

The weather will surely be warm and pleasant in early June, and Columbus is a wonderful city to explore and a great restaurant town to boot.

Here’s what they should have said.

It will be perfect football weather in mid-September and Columbus is home to the National Champion Ohio State Buckeyes.

Of course, that would have required (a) holding the conference on a football weekend, (b) arranging tickets to the Ohio State game for conference participants and (c) fitting the conference schedule around the game, but if they’d done all that they’d have an impressive attendance.

I think introducing some aspects of philosophy via sport potentially can be very effective pedagogically. It seems Cornell is already ahead of the game on this. They already have a course on the philosophy of sport. Maybe if my freshman seminar this year goes well next year I can do a freshman course on philosophy of sport. On second thoughts, that probably is not the best way to start addressing the male/female imbalance in undergrad philosophy classes. On third thought, doing a course with a large sci-fi component as I am this year – my freshman seminar is on time travel – probably isn’t much better in this regard. And the Cornell philosophy of sport class does have a discussion of Title IX, which is more than can be said for my time travel course.

More seriously, I guess, I also found through EpistemeLinks a hypertext version of the Tractatus. Use wisely.