I didn’t get as much philosophical work done this weekend as I should have, but I did find a way to cut $1500 off my summer travel costs, so it wasn’t entirely wasted.
The “papers blog”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Opp/ for Monday is up, and I’ve corrected a mistake on Sunday’s edition. There are papers by Henry Stapp on Bell’s inequality, and David Carlson on God’s (mere?) existence, but the most exciting is Ken Taylor’s paper on “Perry on opacity”:http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/TQxNWNmM/Misplaced.pdf.
Ken’s paper suggests a natural idea. How much to ring up “philosophy talk”:http://www.philosophytalk.org/ as be like, “So John, I was reading Ken’s criticisms, and they sound pretty good to me. I was wondering if you had anything to say for yourself, or you just wanted to concede defeat straight away.”? Since you wouldn’t actually get on the air the answer is actually close to zero, just ringing up would be fairly cheap, I guess, but maybe we could restrict payoffs to people who get on-air and ask that. (Disclaimer: I really don’t recommend anyone actually ring up Philosophy Talk and ask that. Unless of course they decide to have a show on referential opacity, in which case all bets are off.)
When Ken started talking about the ‘paleo-Griceans’ I was hoping he meant to be talking about views like mine. But it turns out he wasn’t, so I’ll have to be a paleo-something-else this week.
“Gil Harman”:http://www.princeton.edu/~harman/Papers/Davidson-photos.html has posted a couple of photos of Donald Davidson from the late 1960s, but they take _forever_ to load. Still, it’s fairly cute to see everyone from back in the day. But was it normal to have an all-male department as late as 1968, as Princeton apparently did? I don’t know the relevant history here, so maybe this was still fairly standard at the time.
Oh, and the “break-up lines post”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/tar/Archives/002593.html, to which I contributed hardly a word, has become the first post on TAR to get 50 comments, and is now #3 Google search for “break up lines”:http://www.google.com/search?q=break+up+lines&sourceid=mozilla-search&start=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8.