Since the feedback on my last tenure post was overwhelmingly negative, I won’t try arguing again for any anti-tenure conclusions. But I was a little heartened to note I’m not the only academic blogger to come out in favour of post-tenure review. Of course, while the institution of tenure exists, I am all in favour of tenure for Brian, just in case that wasn’t obvious!

My paper Luminous Margins just got accepted by the AJP. Woo hoo! I’m starting to think I should care more about the quality of my papers than their quantity, but I haven’t reached that point yet.

I only just saw the acknowledgments page on Tamar Gendler and John Hawthorne’s Fake Barns paper.

For comments and encouragement, we are grateful to Stewart Cohen and Alvin Goldman. Special thanks are due to Agent Brown (Brian Weatherson) and Agent Causation (Jonathan Schaffer), who provided careful comments on an earlier draft of this memo.

If people keep writing like that I’m going to end up writing philosophy papers with nothing but (attempted) jokes in them. Oh wait, perhaps I already did. On the other hand I haven’t come up with a pun quite like Agent Causation yet, so maybe I need to keep trying.

The papers blog today has more new papers up today than it has had for about the last two weeks. Lots of good stuff to check out.

The papers blog today has more new papers up today than it has had for about the last two weeks. Lots of good stuff to check out.

The post below isn’t meant to be entirely serious. But I think the position it defends is more plausible than a lot of people take it to be. I thought Ehring’s arguments that the standard arguments for ‘dualism’ (as I naturally call the view that there are two people where really one exists) were ineffective looked correct. So I thought I should have a crack at writing positive arguments for the view that fission leads to bilocation. The arguments aren’t the most compelling ever created, but they’re better than some I’ve written.

The post below isn’t meant to be entirely serious. But I think the position it defends is more plausible than a lot of people take it to be. I thought Ehring’s arguments that the standard arguments for ‘dualism’ (as I naturally call the view that there are two people where really one exists) were ineffective looked correct. So I thought I should have a crack at writing positive arguments for the view that fission leads to bilocation. The arguments aren’t the most compelling ever created, but they’re better than some I’ve written.

Here’s a common objection to psychological
continuity accounts of personal identity. As a result of a rather disastrous
spell, Harry Potter’s body is destroyed, though fortunately his psychological
states are imprinted in life-size statues of Peregrin ‘Pippin’ Took and
Meriadoc ‘Merry’ Brandybuck, which subsequently become active, moving around
and insisting, rather stroppily, that they are Harry Potter. Had Harry’s
psychological states simply been implanted in (the statue of) Pippin, then
psychological continuity theorists would have no trouble saying that Pippin is
Harry. The situation, from their perspective, is be little different to if
Harry had been the victim of a particularly eloquent Transmogrification spell.
But Merry causes a problem. For, the argument goes, Merry is not Pippin, so we
cannot both say that Harry is Pippin and that Harry is Pippin. Perhaps though,
as Douglas Ehring (1987) has suggested, we should deny the claim that Merry is
not Pippin, and instead insist that we have a bilocated person. Here I want to
set out a couple of arguments in favour of Ehring’s claim.

Continue reading →

Here’s a common objection to psychological
continuity accounts of personal identity. As a result of a rather disastrous
spell, Harry Potter’s body is destroyed, though fortunately his psychological
states are imprinted in life-size statues of Peregrin ‘Pippin’ Took and
Meriadoc ‘Merry’ Brandybuck, which subsequently become active, moving around
and insisting, rather stroppily, that they are Harry Potter. Had Harry’s
psychological states simply been implanted in (the statue of) Pippin, then
psychological continuity theorists would have no trouble saying that Pippin is
Harry. The situation, from their perspective, is be little different to if
Harry had been the victim of a particularly eloquent Transmogrification spell.
But Merry causes a problem. For, the argument goes, Merry is not Pippin, so we
cannot both say that Harry is Pippin and that Harry is Pippin. Perhaps though,
as Douglas Ehring (1987) has suggested, we should deny the claim that Merry is
not Pippin, and instead insist that we have a bilocated person. Here I want to
set out a couple of arguments in favour of Ehring’s claim.

Continue reading →

More websites to announce. John Hawthorne now has a website up with lots of papers.

http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~kahern/hawthorne/

There’s lots of interesting papers there, and I’ll add them to the papers blog tomorrow. Note for those of us who are gossip-inclined: there’s a perfectly good explanation for why this site is hosted in Berkeley, and it doesn’t involve John moving there any time soon. (Or if it does I am embarrassingly out of the loop and would rather appreciate being filled in.) Thanks to Kent Bach for the news of this site.