The APA Eastern gets a fairly bad press, but I normally look forward to it. It always seems like it should be a good idea to have 2/3rds of my friends in the country gathered in the one place. Most years something manages to go wrong, but this year was a rather enjoyable conference.

The downside of all the partying was that between that and all the interviews, I only attended one session. But it was a very good one – the symposium on Ted Sider’s Four-Dimensionalism. So the average quality of papers I attended was higher than for any other APA I’ve been too, which was nice. Hopefully over the weekend I’ll write some comments on one of the (many) interesting things Sally Haslanger said, but the other three contributors (Mark Heller, Mark Hinchliff and Ted) also made excellent contributions. It might seem like damning with faint praise, but the fact that someone who’d approached the conference the way I had could be kept attentive and interested through a 3-hour symposium on the final day is really a remarkable tribute to the quality of the presentations. Hopefully many of the points the speakers made will be worked into future publications.

One quick comment on some rumours I heard flying around in DC and at various post-conference get-togethers. Brown has not already decided who we’ll be hiring, and we certainly don’t have any offers out. If we had effectively made our minds up already then I’d hope we’d have fewer hiring meetings scheduled than we do. We are still looking at many very good candidates at both junior and senior levels. Whoever we get, whether they be a new PhD or a well-established philosopher, or someone in between, will be a great benefit to the department in philosophy of science, and probably in other areas too. Any prospective grad students who were thinking of not applying to Brown because of our weakness in philosophy of science should rest assured we will be much stronger in philosophy of science going forward. So send in those applications!