Peter Ludlow, who many of you will know as a philosopher of language, was spending a fair chunk of his virtual life running a newspaper, The Alphaville Herald that reports on happenings in, you guessed it, Alphaville, a community in The Sims Online.

Recently he reported a case of real-world child abuse that was mentioned by an in game character, and encouraged Maxis (who runs TSO) to report the person involved to the police. (Users can’t do this because they only know players through their handles, not their real names.) After some delay, Maxis did this, though they don’t seem to have been as happy to do so as one might have hoped.

Shortly afterwards the Herald reported that an underage (virtual) brothel was being run in Alphaville. It’s not entirely clear what the legal status of this is, but it’s not obviously not akin to having an underage phone sex service, which clearly is illegal. In any case, Maxis’s response wasn’t to try to shut down the brothel, but to expel Ludlow from the game.

Bringing this all back to me (as I always do on my blog) I knew all about this a couple of days ago, and planned to get around to writing it up as soon as I was done reading job files. (I should add I’m incredibly inefficient at that task – I really hope I get better before my next stint on a search committee. Next task is to find out how good an interviewer I am.) But delay is always a mistake in journalism – I’ve lost my one ever scoop to Salon, who run a reasonable story about what’s happened and why it might matter.

I’m the subject of normblog’s latest profile of a blogger. Some days a blog really does feel like a vanity press.

A symposium in honor of Judith Thomson

Friday January 16th 2004

The Wong Auditorium, E51-115 (all welcome)

10am to 6pm: symposium

Guest Speakers:
Stephen Darwall, University of Michigan
Shelly Kagan, Yale University
Thomas Nagel, New York University

The MIT Faculty Club, E52 (50 Memorial Drive), sixth floor (invitation only)

6.15pm to 7pm: cocktails (cash bar)

7pm: dinner

For more information, contact Christine Graham (cgraham@mit.edu).

A symposium in honor of Judith Thomson

Friday January 16th 2004

The Wong Auditorium, E51-115 (all welcome)

10am to 6pm: symposium

Guest Speakers:
Stephen Darwall, University of Michigan
Shelly Kagan, Yale University
Thomas Nagel, New York University

The MIT Faculty Club, E52 (50 Memorial Drive), sixth floor (invitation only)

6.15pm to 7pm: cocktails (cash bar)

7pm: dinner

For more information, contact Christine Graham (cgraham@mit.edu).

I hadn’t heard of any of these moves. Brian’s right that this could be big for Notre Dame. I don’t know the work of two historians they have offers to, but they do have stellar reputations. And Stewart Shapiro, who also has a very high reputation, is probably underrated in my opinion. His formal work hasn’t had the same impact on the broader philosophical community as similar work by, say, Tim Williamson or Crispin Wright, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that changes a bit in the next few years. And I guess most readers will know how big a deal the other moves listed could be. Of course these are all offers not definite moves so don’t bank on anything, but all very interesting.

(I know it’s slightly indecorous to be gossiping like this, but it’s Hot Stove season, and I simply can’t help it. The move I really want to know about is Alex Rodriguez from UT-Arlington to BU, but despite his proximity to the action I don’t think even Brian Leiter could tell me when and whether that will happen.)

One more philosophy blog to add to the list. Jeremy Pierce, a philosophy grad student at Syracuse (which most of you probably know was my old stomping ground) has set up ParableMania. It’s got considerably more serious discussion of religion than I’ll ever have here.

If anyone at Pitt is reading this, the grad student page seems to be missing some links to grad student homepages. I was thinking of trying to crawl the Pitt site finding out how many grad students have unlinked pages, because I know it is >0, but I decided I’d leave it to someone else. (I often do that.) If the page gets updated I’ll put up a bunch of links to the papers like I did with the Princeton page the other day, which I think would be a useful thing for both Pitt’s students and (especially) for OPP readers.

I’m not the most paternal chap in the world, but if I do have kids I want them to be like Brad DeLong’s.

Having spent most of the weekend reading reference letters and writing samples I wholeheartedly agree with Brian Leiter’s recommendation: comparisons to well-known philosophers count for much more in reference letters than the usual generic “X is a wonderful philosopher” letters. They are even more powerful than comparisons to your own students, which can easily be overdone. One prominent philosopher endorsed four of the candidates I was reviewing tonight – saying each was one of the best that (s)he’d seen in twenty-something years. You really don’t want to say that about too many people with names at similar points in the alphabet who will be applying for similar jobs.

The short answer to John Holbo’s question is that there is one super-maxim: Be uncooperative. The more precise maxims may take some work, but I think the reverse maxim of quantity – say the weakest thing you can get away with, will probably be on the list.

Between Emma’s letter to Aristotle and Matt’s note to Al Gore it’s becoming a week for snarky philosophers. I had some thoughts for a longer post in reaction to what Emma said, but maybe I’ll leave it for a night when I’m up at 4am for more recreational reasons.

Part of that longer post was going to include an “I can remember thinking that way when I was younger” story, but now that Emma has an I’m getting old post I might want to skip that part. Nostalgically remembering what it was like to be getting old is a bad state. I’m having to find more and more spectacular things to do so I can say I’m young for an X, where X is some category I actually fall into.

I’ve thought the discussion between Keith and David under my somewhat overblown Heaven and Hell post has been really interesting. I’m still glad to be on the Catholic side of these debates, but the Protestant position is (as I should have realised) much more nuanced, and more plausible, than I gave it credit for.

This is a little bit freaky. Right now if you do a Google search for Weatherson you get in the sidebar two ‘sponsored links’, one for Philosophy Body Care, and the other for Philosophy the Gingerbread Man. (No I’m not making this up. Not even I have that twisted an imagination.)

I thought this must be because there was a lot of instances of the word ‘philosophy’ in my pages and the companies in question pay to be displayed alongside for any such search. But I can’t find a single other philosopher such that searching for them brings up the ads in question. Searching for ‘philosophy’ does, but that’s the only search I found that works. There’s a disturbingly high probability (i.e. >0.001) that the companies in question actually paid to be displayed alongside a Google search for my name, and as such to boot.

Thanks of a sort to Benj Hellie for alerting me to my new role in life.

has a blog here. It’s a political blog not a philosophy blog, but blogs by good philosophers are always welcome. Hat tip: Brian Leiter, who includes an interesting bit of historical gossip in his link.

At the end of the first quarter, with Miami having a ridiculous wind at its back and still playing a lot like Miami teams in cold weather normally play, the commentator said:

Miami’s been able to not do anything with that wind.

This is an aspect of American English that I just never get used to. I’m used to negations appearing outside an operator that they have to be interpreted as being inside, as in “I don’t believe that Bush is a competent President.”. But I have to manually parse sentences where the negation is meant to take wide scope but it appears to take narrow scope in surface structure. I don’t think I heard many sentences like that in Australia, but they don’t seem that rare in America.