The papers blog is up, with one new site – Monash graduate Toby Handfield has a site with some papers on laws and laws – and a review by Karen Bennett of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy: Fear and Trembling in Sunnydale. Karen’s main complaint was that there wasn’t much philosophy in BtVS and Philosophy, but I thought she went a little overboard in arguing for that here:

Philosophers are simply not in the business of studying the fictional content of fictions.

fn: That is not to say that they are not interested in fiction qua fiction. The prospects for ’fictionalism’ about various problematic entities—numbers, possible worlds, moral truths—partly turn on working out how to understand the notion of truth according to a fiction. And both philosophers of language and metaphysicians are interested in metaphor. Etc.

That’s a bit metaphysics-centred I think. Even if fictionalism were obviously false, and even if we had settled all problems about metaphor, there would still be an interesting philosophical question about the nature of fictional representation. Representation as such is a philosophically interesting topic, probably the most philosophically interesting. And fictional representation is an intriguing special case of that topic, independent of its connection to anything else.

This is not to say that the content of any given fiction is philosophically interesting. Concluding that would be like inferring from the fact that mental representation is philosophically interesting (and since it’s the central philosophical question of the last 350 years I guess it is) to the claim that what Joe Bloggs is thinking right now is philosophically interesting. So I agree (I think) with what Karen is concluding here, but I think her arguments for it are too sweeping.