Blogging will be very light for the next few days because (a) it’s very hard to have original thoughts during the playoffs, (b) I have an insane number of deadlines approaching and (c) I’m off to Ottawa for the weekend. Still, there’s lots of stuff on the papers blog (even if I didn’t have time to do abstracts this morning), and good posts by Rosanne, Wo and Juan if you want philosophical blogging. Or you could write comments telling me how good our book proposal is! See you all next week. (Unless I can’t help writing something between now and then.)

From a job ad posted by the University of Texas

Rank: Open. AOS: Ethics, Metaphysics & Epistemology (construed
broadly to include Philosophy of Mind and Philosophy of Language), or History of Philosophy (especially Ancient, Modern, Kant, or post-Kantian).

Doesn’t this just mean AOS: philosophy? I guess there are some areas that could, on some readings, be read as falling outside the scope of this ad. I guess logic, maybe philosophy of law, perhaps medieval philosophy, at a pinch political philosophy if it isn’t taken to be a branch of ethics, but by now I’m really reaching.

I generally take ethics (broadly construed), M&E (broadly construed) and history to cover pretty much everything that goes on in contemporary philosophy, so either I’m leaving out some important areas, or this is a needlessly complicated job ad. On the other hand, if it’s just a complicated way of saying AOS: philosophy, then I heartily approve of the content if not the complication.

Following up on last night’s idea, one more idea for the philosophy and The Onion collection. A point/counterpoint on Newcomb’s Problem.

Leaving Money on the Table is Dumb, Dumb, Dumb; vs.
If You’re So Smart, Why Ain’cha Rich?

I know the second heading has been used before, but probably not for an Onion-style article. The text of these articles is left as an exercise for the reader.

Following up on Merlin’s post, I thought I’d mention one or two things about the Oxford Philosophy Graduate Conference.

First, I was going to pass along some congratulations for having a paper accepted, but since it isn’t clear that it’s public knowledge which papers have been accepted (i.e. the Oxford site doesn’t say which papers are accepted) it’s not clear that’s information I’m meant to be distributing. I’m always tempted to assume anything I know is thereby public knowledge (am I not a member of the public?) but sometimes I should show more discretion. So this is advance notice of congratulations.

Second, I was rather shocked by this feature of the Oxford conference.

Oxford’s graduate philosophy conferences are unique in that faculty members lead the replies to student papers, thus providing student participants with the opportunity to engage in direct discussion of their papers with leading philosophers.

Well that’s unique all right. I think just thinking about this too hard will lead to nightmares about Tim Williamson or Michael Dummett commenting on one of my grad school quality efforts. It may shock TAR readers, but I wasn’t always the brash self-confident young philosopher you see now. This kind of ‘engagement’ may have been more than my fragile psyche could have handled back in grad school. I hope today’s grad students are mentally tougher than I was.

I imagine most people who are interested saw this on a-phil, but if not it won’t do any harm to post it here.

From Deborah Brown (University of Queensland)

Dear All,

The Australasian Association of Philosophy has booked a reception table at the Eastern Division Meetings of the American Philosophical Association in Washington in December for peripatetic Australasians and anyone else they can pick up. If you are planning to be in Washington please drop by the table and avail yourself of dulcet tones much like your own and a Tim Tam or two.

Deb

At big conferences you can go days without seeing all the Australians there, so it’s nice that we’ll all have a spot to meetup at.

There’s a couple of little jokes I’d like to make about some things on the APA call for papers site, but before I start I should note that the JFP section of their site is back up. Kudos to them for getting this fixed on a weekend (and a holiday weekend at that). I still think JFP should be freely available, but perhaps this cost to it being fee-based isn’t as bad as I expected. (By the way, I already pay for APA membership and will continue to do so whether or not the JFP is part of the membership, so this is not special pleading. I just think it’d be most efficient to not be collecting payments here.)

Laurie Paul alerted me to this call for papers: The Undead and Philosophy. Here’s the call in its entirity.

Call For Abstracts

The Undead and Philosophy

Richard Greene & K. Silem Mohammad, Editors

Abstracts are sought for a collection of philosophical essays on the theme of the undead. The editors are currently in discussion with Open Court Press (The publisher of The Simpsons and Philosophy, The Matrix and philosophy, and the forthcoming The Sopranos and Philosophy, etc.) regarding the inclusion of this collection in a new book series dealing with philosophy and various cultural topics. We are seeking abstracts, but anyone who has already written an unpublished paper on this topic may submit it in its entirety. Potential contributors may want to examine other volumes in the Open Court series.

Contributors are welcome to submit abstracts on any topic of philosophical interest that pertains to the theme of the undead. We define "the undead" as that class of corporeal beings who at some point were living creatures, have died, and have come back such that they are not presently "at rest." This would include supernatural beings such as zombies, vampires, mummies, and other reanimated corpses. The editors are especially interested in receiving submissions that engage the following perspectives: philosophy of mind; the metaphysics of death; political and social philosophy; ontology and other topics in metaphysics; ethics and bioethics; aesthetics; cultural theory and globalization studies; race and gender; epistemology; philosophy of religion; phenomenology and existentialism. Possible topics might include, but are not limited to, the following: zombie-based critiques of functionalist theories of mind; historical treatments of the undead in philosophy; the films of George Romero, Danny Boyle, and Joss Whedon; the novels of Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Anne Rice, Bruce Campbell, and Poppy Z. Brite; critical writing by Julia Kristeva, Jalal Toufic, and Slavoj Zizek.

Please feel free to forward this to anyone writing within a philosophic discipline who might be interested in contributing.

Contributor Guidelines:

1. Abstract of paper (100–750 words)
2. Resume/CV for each author/coauthor of the paper
3. Initial submission may be by mail or email (prefer e-mail with MS Word attachment)
4. Submission deadline: December 15, 2003

Mail:

Richard Greene
Department of Political Science and Philosophy
Weber State University

1203 University Circle
Ogden, UT 84408-1203

Email:

rgreene@weber.edu
silem@ucsc.edu

I think zombies as used in anti-functionalist arguments are not the problem in 28 Days Later. Though it would be pretty exciting if they were. “Watch out – if they bite you you’ll look just the same on the outside but you’ll lose your inner life. It’s impossible to tell who’s a zombie except by, er, there’s gotta be by somehow right?”

Much thanks to Laurie for passing this along.

The other call for papers is almost as good.

Philosophy and The Onion. Now soliciting proposals for projected philosophical anthology on any aspect of The Onion, America’s leading satirical newspaper. Brief, informal proposals are welcome at this stage. Submit to Graham Harman at toolbeing@yahoo.com (deadline for initial proposals is October 31, 2003)

At first I thought that said Gilbert Harman. My whole image of Princeton philosophy was being overturned as I looked at the screen. But it was all a mistake. (Unless it’s a very clever fake name!)

I think rather than writing about philosophy and The Onion it would be better to write philosophy in the style of The Onion. Perhaps “Area man think he’s got an original solution to the sceptical paradoxes.”

UPDATE: I was going to write this up for Crooked Timber, but I thought Kieran would probably do a better job of it. And he did.

The third line of the latest Powderfinger album is:

You’re swollen like a lexicon.

If that’s the best they can come up with it seems to imply not swollen at all.

By the way, the album isn’t particularly good. If you were going to buy it because you’re still hoping they can recapture the quality of their early work, save your dollars and be spared some disappointment.

I’d been meaning to write about how it would probably be better for everyone if the APA made Jobs for Philosophers free for everyone, and simply upped the cost of advertising in it to cover the cost of distributing it to members. I was going to make some fairly general arguments about how it’s a good idea to avoid micropayments, and how the extra advertising cost to departments would probably be worth it because more people would see the ad, but actually there’s a much simpler reason for making JFP freely available.

If JFP was free it would mean that when the program that checks logins is not working, people could still access the advertisements. (As you might have guessed, as I’m writing this it is not working.) If you’re not going to run a 24/7 operation, and obviously it would be absurd for the APA to do this, then you shouldn’t have important services be vulnerable to these simple software errors that can’t be corrected until the office reopens.

I should add that the APA do lots of good things to help job seekers around this time of year. It’s a lot easier to find jobs in America than in Australia or Britain. In part that’s because it’s a larger market, but in part it’s because of the coordination the APA helps provide. I just think it would make their service better (and easier to provide) if they didn’t complicate the process by requiring sign-in to get to the ads. In general I think classifieds services should not require payment to view the ads. You should be trying to maximise the number of viewers of the ads, and payments just restrict it. It seems to be it would be a very rare case where it is not maximally efficient to make the sellers pay anything beyond the marginal distribution cost, if you charge even that.

is a new philosophy blog. It’s psuedonymous, so we can all have fun trying to figure out who the author is. I’m not sure that every respectable philosopher is blogging nowadays, as ‘Merlin’ writes. In fact for all I know all the professional philosophers in America who do write for Crooked Timber or the 617 blog. (Though there are several linguists who do philosophically important work who blog, and plenty of smart graduate students who do so too.)

Glenn Mason, Minnesota head coach, was asked before tonight’s game with Michigan how he was going to cope with Michigan’s multi-pronged offence. His answer:

I guess we’re going to have to cheat a bit

That’s pretty much what I think too, though I certainly wouldn’t have admitted that before the game.