The memorial notice for Paul Ziff by Jay Rosenberg that Brian Leiter praises really is very good. If you have an APA account you can access it online here. I guess this is copyrighted (though I don’t know why) so I won’t repost the whole thing here, but if you have access to the APA site it is well worth reading.

Geoff Pullum is entirely right about what’s wrong with the Foot in Mouth award given to Donald Rumsfeld. I feel all dirty having to stick up for Rumsfeld, even this indirectly, so now I have a visceral dislike for the Plain English Campaign.

Geoff’s posts the last week (especially the Vegas postcards one two three) have been great even by his standards. Kaye Trammell spends a lot of time noting what real-world celebrities do with their blogs. I never really understood the interest in this – I don’t even know half the celebrities involved – until I realised that I’m such an academic junkie that the ‘celebrities’ whose blogs I’d care most about are leading academics who write well. So reading the latest thoughts of people like John Quiggin and Brad DeLong and Geoff is much more interesting to me than reading what Moby (or whoever) had for breakfast. Now we just need a few more top philosophers to run blogs and I’ll be in bloggy heaven.

Oxford University Press has put a large number of recent books in economics, political science, philosophy and religion online here. Unfortunately you need to subscribe, or be part of an institution that does, to get to most of the best parts, but for those of us with computers attached to university networks, this is an incredibly good service. Three cheers for OUP! (Hat tip: Michael Green.)

I agree with Allan Hazlett about what these experiments do and don’t show. I bet most monkeys and dolphins are not epistemicists about vagueness.

I just got a large pile of job applications to read, so posting will be light here the next week or so. (It’s probably unfair and/or illegal to blog about job applications, as tempting as it may be.) So now seems like as good a time as any to add a feature I’ve been meaning to add for a while – links to my favourite old posts, and to the old posts that contain good ideas I haven’t yet worked into solid papers.

One purpose of the blog is that it’s meant to be a scrapbook for ideas, a place to write them down so they don’t get lost. But between all the junk I post here there’s a chance they will get lost anyway. So now I have the posts that actually make a serious attempt to make philosophical progress located prominently.

Of course, several of the favourite posts are also junk by purely philosophical standards – I don’t think my parody of/homage to Joyce moves philosophy forward any, for example – but the workbench should just contain attempts at newish work.

Unfortunately many of the old posts had good comments threads that got lost in the transfer to MT. When I have less to do maybe I’ll try and reconstruct those. Also note that the old posts tend to have quirky formatting – some of them were before I learned to stop worrying and love CSS. Hopefully that doesn’t make them unreadable. Also note that the writing gets progressively worse as you move back in time. That might make some of the posts unreadable, or at least make it somewhat unclear what I was trying to say.

I’m sure I’ve run this quote before sometime, but it’s always worth repeating.

Here is a revealing comparison. For the annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association the Program Committee sifts submissions carefully and rejects 80 percent. The Australasian Association of Philosophy does not sift submissions. Yet every year the AAP program is better overall than the APA program.

Professor William Lycan, UNC – Chapel Hill

Remember, next year’s conference is on a resort island, so if you are ever going to go to find out whether Bill is telling whoppers, or if unrefereed Australian philosophy really is better than refereed American philosophy, 2004 is a great time to go.

I’m sure I’ve run this quote before sometime, but it’s always worth repeating.

Here is a revealing comparison. For the annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association the Program Committee sifts submissions carefully and rejects 80 percent. The Australasian Association of Philosophy does not sift submissions. Yet every year the AAP program is better overall than the APA program.

Professor William Lycan, UNC – Chapel Hill

Remember, next year’s conference is on a resort island, so if you are ever going to go to find out whether Bill is telling whoppers, or if unrefereed Australian philosophy really is better than refereed American philosophy, 2004 is a great time to go.

Since I only had 27 other better things to do, I started tinkering with the blog structure. Now if you hunt around the individual entry pages, some things won’t look particularly snazzy. Not for the first time, I broke something and couldn’t figure out how to put it back together. Maybe tomorrow I’ll do better, or more likely I’ll leave it broken until I really do have the time to work on it. (UPDATE: It’s half-fixed now. Maybe I’ll do a little more later in the week. Let me know if you have browser compatability issues with the new layout.)

Since I only had 27 other better things to do, I started tinkering with the blog structure. Now if you hunt around the individual entry pages, some things won’t look particularly snazzy. Not for the first time, I broke something and couldn’t figure out how to put it back together. Maybe tomorrow I’ll do better, or more likely I’ll leave it broken until I really do have the time to work on it. (UPDATE: It’s half-fixed now. Maybe I’ll do a little more later in the week. Let me know if you have browser compatability issues with the new layout.)