At the recent Syracuse Metaphysics conference I commented on Roy Sorensen’s paper on prepunishment (not online). This part of the commentary wasn’t really on topic, but it was kind of amusing. (Well, it got more laughs than my usual attempts at weaving jokes into philosophy do. Perhaps that was because I started with the jokes and tried to weave in the philosophy.) There’s nothing particularly deep here, but I do think it challenges the view that folk ontology does not include temporal parts.
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Two more sites for your list of sites with online papers

Josh Parsons
Oystein Linnebo

Thanks to Matti Eklund for the link to Oystein’s site. I don’t know how I missed Josh’s site – there’s lots of good metaphysics there.

Wo writes:

It’s great that John Burgess makes all his interesting drafts of papers and books available online. It would even be better though if he’d publish them in a format that I can actually read (without having to buy a certain software). So if you’re John Burgess or somebody else publishing on the web, please convert your documents to pdf or ps before uploading them.

I’ve been noticing a few people putting documents online in Word format, with John Burgess being one of the more prominent examples. I think this is a pretty bad idea, but its effects can be ameliorated somewhat. The Microsoft Word Viewer is available free, and will let you at least read these articles. At least, if you are running a Windows system it will. There should be a Word Viewer for Macs, but I couldn’t find one in 30 seconds of looking around.

I fully agree with Wo’s main point though. It isn’t that hard to convert docs to PDF and it greatly increases your potential readership.

The Brown email server is malfunctioning (again) so if you’ve sent me email in the last 24 hours it probably hasn’t come through. Sorry for the delays in responding and hopefully normal service will be resumed shortly.

Here’s a sketch of an idea for the intro to a paper Andy Egan, John Hawthorne and I are doing on epistemic modals. It will almost certainly be changed, not least because writing it in what looks a lot like my style makes it look like my paper when in reality 90% of the ideas contained in it will be due to Egan and/or Hawthorne, but that’s no reason not to post it here.

Any novel thoughts about how to get out of the paradox at the end would be appreciated.
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As Ken Taylor notes in the comments below, the Philosophy Talk shows will soon be archived at:

http://www.stanford.edu/philosophytalk/

I listened to the first show today (while I should have been syllabising) and thought it sounded pretty good. Ken and John displayed a lot more skill at dealing with talkback than I would have shown. (And I thought I was very restrained for not calling up to chat about the details of Ken’s invariantist approach to comparative adjectives. Much more interesting than lying I think!) Most importantly, I thought it sounded accessible while not compromising the philosophical quality, which is the important balance for a show like this.

As Ken Taylor notes in the comments below, the Philosophy Talk shows will soon be archived at:

http://www.stanford.edu/philosophytalk/

I listened to the first show today (while I should have been syllabising) and thought it sounded pretty good. Ken and John displayed a lot more skill at dealing with talkback than I would have shown. (And I thought I was very restrained for not calling up to chat about the details of Ken’s invariantist approach to comparative adjectives. Much more interesting than lying I think!) Most importantly, I thought it sounded accessible while not compromising the philosophical quality, which is the important balance for a show like this.

It’s frequently amusing to have a look at which Google searches people are using to find your various sites, but sometimes it’s just disturbing.

This is a follow-up to my earlier post on whether Keith DeRose’s bank cases provide prima facie support for contextualism.

I thought I had an argument that contextualists couldn’t explain some of the data about the bank cases. Then I realised that given enough tools the contextualists could explain anything the invariantists could explain. Whether such a contextualism is plausible is another matter.
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