Just for kicks, I put all my papers (published, forthcoming, and sorta kinda accepted) into a single large PDF file. Where possible this includes the published PDF, which I’m not sure is the right thing to do. (Maybe I won’t leave this posted forever.) But if for some reason you want to read all my stuff, here it is. (Warning: this is a 2MB file, so don’t try downloading on a slow connection.)

All of Brian’s papers

A draft program is available here. Much thanks to Utah, and in particular I gather Leslie Francis, for making this available as early as they have.

UPDATE: If anyone from the program committee is reading, can I just make a small request? There’s like 3 things I want to see at every session. The worst clash is when the Bach vs King/Stanley cage match is on at the same time as my talk, but there are plenty of bad clashes like this throughout. (By the way, for that session my tip is go to the cage match, and if you’re betting remember King has home-court advantage.) There’s an easy solution to this, which is to make the conference about 2 weeks long. I think this should be feasible financially and so on, and then there wouldn’t be as many good papers on at the same time.

I’m back. And I’ve merely got 70 changed pages to track for the papers blog, 70 non-spam emails to respond to, and one or two jobs (syllabus writing, graduate admissions, paper editing, etc) that I was putting off until post-Davis to do. How people who have any other responsibilities manage this kind of workload is a mystery to me.

Much thanks to everyone from Sacramento, Davis, Berkeley, San Francisco and Palo Alto (and points between) who provided such generous hospitality. It sure is fun visiting California – which is why I guess I’ll be doing it a few times this semester. Next stop: APA Pacific in late March.

Colin McGinn is not Pablo Picasso.

The Times of London – January 13

“I won’t talk to my colleagues about philosophy. It is too boring to me,” he [McGinn] says.

But why?

“They are too stupid.”

He can’t say that!

“No, they don’t get it. And I don’t want to have an hour’s conversation about it.”

But they have read the same texts?

“Oh, yes. This is where I get much more intolerant. I know exactly what they are going to say. They ought to know what I am going to say, but apparently they don’t.”

We love you too Colin. Elsewhere he launches into personal attacks against the recently deceased, which is always a pleasant way to pass the time with major newspaper reporters.

Thanks to Peter Ludlow for the link, which has sadly now expired for those without Times subscriptions. I’ve attached the text below for those without subscriptions.
Continue reading →

Colin McGinn is not Pablo Picasso.

The Times of London – January 13

“I won’t talk to my colleagues about philosophy. It is too boring to me,” he [McGinn] says.

But why?

“They are too stupid.”

He can’t say that!

“No, they don’t get it. And I don’t want to have an hour’s conversation about it.”

But they have read the same texts?

“Oh, yes. This is where I get much more intolerant. I know exactly what they are going to say. They ought to know what I am going to say, but apparently they don’t.”

We love you too Colin. Elsewhere he launches into personal attacks against the recently deceased, which is always a pleasant way to pass the time with major newspaper reporters.

Thanks to Peter Ludlow for the link, which has sadly now expired for those without Times subscriptions. I’ve attached the text below for those without subscriptions.
Continue reading →

is where I’ll be for the next few days, so don’t expect frequent updates. There are a lot of things I would like to write, but my experiences blogging from the Treo so far have not being fantastic – the main problem being that when it times out I tend to lose posts. So TAR might be fairly quiet. Feel free to chat amongst yourselves on the message boards though!

Big article on crime, the Mafia and prostitution in Alphaville in the Globe today. Peter Ludlow, the philosophical and now journalistic leader of the virtual world, is quoted extensively. (Though at one point a flurry of pronouns made me think the Globe was accusing Ludlow of being a crook – thankfully not true.) It all makes the Sims world sound like Sydney, but without the bridge, opera house or harbour.

I noted below the existence of the latest draft of the truer paper in Word form. Here it is in PDF form, in which hopefully a few more of the symbols will show up.

True, Truer, Truest – 8000 word Jan 04 version

Every spring my main hobby is working out my travel plans for the summer. Right now I’m seriously considering a travel plan that involves, among other things, the following.

• Bus from Providence to Boston
• Fly from Boston to London
• Train from London to Edinburgh
• Train/Bus from Edinburgh to St Andrews
• Train/Bus from St Andrews to Edinburgh
• Train from Edinburgh to London
• Fly from London to Boston
• Fly from Boston to Melbourne (via who knows where)
• Fly from Melbourne to Hamilton Island
• Boat from Hamilton Island to South Molle Island
• Boat from South Molle Island to Hamilton Island
• Fly from Hamilton Island to Melbourne
• Fly from Melbourne to Canberra
• Fly from Canberra to Melbourne
• Fly from Melbourne to Seattle (via who knows where)
• Drive from Seattle to Bellingham
• Drive from Bellingham to Seattle
• Fly from Seattle to wherever I’m living next year

And all that over 10 weeks or so. It should be memorable, but expensive.

While on NDPR, I thought this comment from Timothy Bays’s review of David Corfield’s Towards a Philosophy of Real Mathematics was interesting.

The sociological differences between philosophy of physics and philosophy of mathematics really are quite striking. At present, I think it would be difficult for a junior candidate in philosophy of physics to do well on the job market without being familiar with (at least some) high-end topics in theoretical physics—i.e., without genuinely understanding the technical details of such topics. In contrast, there’s almost no expectation that candidates in philosophy of mathematics will be equally familiar with contemporary work in, say, algebra, analysis, topology or geometry.

So here’s an interesting question for discussion. For other area that can be labelled “Philosophy of X”, how much knowledge of cutting edge scientific work about X are new job candidates expected to have? The obvious initial candidates are when X is biology, or language, or mind. But we can look further. I really don’t know how much new grads in, say, political philosophy are meant to know about what’s currently going on in the political science department, and I think it would be interesting (both to me and to not a few grad students) to find out. How much are aesthetics grad students meant to keep up with what’s current in the many different departments (art, art history, music, theatre, etc) that do work potentially relevant to philosophical aesthetics?