The “Princeton/Rutgers graduate conference”:http://web.princeton.edu/sites/philosph/gradconf/ has posted its “schedule”:http://web.princeton.edu/sites/philosph/gradconf/schedule.html and the conference “papers”:https://web.princeton.edu/sites/philosph/gradconf/restrict/Papers.html. In case you can’t or won’t visit their site (and I was having some troubles getting in using Firebird), here are direct links to the papers.

New Work for a Language Module? Bryan Baltzly (UMD)

Fuzzy
Link Externalism: Fixing the Problem of Dead Cats and Mental Tails:
Mike Tamir (Pittsburgh)

Thought-experiments,
Intuitions, and Descartes on his Essence: Elliot Paul (Syracuse)

Demonstratives
as Pronouns: Eric Swanson (MIT)

Luck,
Leverage, and Equality: A Bargaining Problem for Luck Egalitarians: Matthew
Seligman (Berkeley)

Physicalism
and Illusions of Epistemic Humility: Alyssa Ney (Brown)

Computationalism
versus the Locality Principle: David Longinotti (UMD)

Skill,
Luck, and Folk Ascriptions of Intentional Action: Thomas Nadelhoffer
(FSU)

In the comments below, Kent Bach linked to “an article in the San Francisco Chronicle”:http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/03/27/DDGEV5R5KJ1.DTL on “Philosophy Talk”:http://www.philosophytalk.org/

There’s a theme between the last two posts. Both the SEP and Philosophy Talk originate from Stanford, they both provide great public services, and, it seems, both need some extra funding to continue.

The “Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy”:http://plato.stanford.edu/ is looking to do some fundraising to cover its (very modest) costs. The details are “here”:http://plato.stanford.edu/fundraising/.

At risk of offending practically every reader of this site, I think this is one of those rare cases where a little advertising would go a long way towards covering costs. If the SEP set up an “Amazon associates”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html/104-2361775-7843169?node=3435371 account, and converted every reference to an in-print book to a live Amazon link, they could raise a huge amount of money with minimal intrusiveness. And it might lead to more philosophy books being sold, which seems to be a good thing.

Here’s a sample of some of the quotes I took down during the APA. I was dying to use some of the off-the-record lines, particularly one great back-handed compliment of New York City, but I’m trying to keep up the impression I have some ethics.

As always, all quotes are out of context. Among other things, they were uttered in Pasadena and I’m writing them up at SFO to be posted from Providence. I probably mistranscribed most of them. And in some cases, particularly the first, I left out qualificatory clauses that change the meaning somewhat – almost like the way appending “NOT!!” does.

“I’m amazed that two critics who understood my book as well as they did could think I was wrong.”

bq. Scott Soames opening his reply by getting more laughs than I got all week.

“I have two quick questions. Both are obnoxious.”

bq. Torin Alter, who then proceeded to ask two of the least obnoxious questions I’ve heard. I asked the next question and it was, well, obnoxious.

“Bwtbwtbwbwbshshshshapapaing.”

bq. Frank Arntzeneuis showing what a ball accelerating to infinite speed while ricocheting back and forth does. (Very rough transcription.)

“The natural thing to say is the ball just disappears.”

bq. Frank doing some a priori physics about the same case.

“I’m sure Jerry Fodor needs no introduction. But this isn’t about Jerry’s needs.”

bq. Ken Taylor shewing that syntax jokes can always be made, and usually are funny.

“I shot an elephant in my pajamas. I don’t know how he got in them.”

bq. Groucho Marx via Jerry Fodor, ditto.

“If you read him long enough and interpret him in the right way, Descartes always turns out to be right about everything.”

bq. Jerry Fodor, revealing that he either believes in dualism or a very charitable interpretation of Descartes.

“Love the blog!”

bq. Many fans before my talk on Friday.

“Where was the !@#$%^& pie”

bq. Same fans after the pie-less talk on Friday.

I might blog a little from the APA Pacific, but I doubt it. So the blog will probably be quiet until next Monday – except perhaps for the comments boards. Hope to see lots of people in Pasadena.

I’d be more excited if he had started posting to “Language Log”:http://www.languagelog.net/, but even if we won’t be seeing flashes of linguistic brilliance, it’s still newsworthy that “Noam Chomsky has started a blog”:http://blog.zmag.org/ttt/. The introductory post is a little hard to decipher.

bq. This blog will include brief comments on diverse topics of concern in our time. They will sometimes come from the ZNet sustainer forum system where Noam interacts through a forum of his own, sometimes from direct submissions, sometimes culled from mail and other outlets — always from Noam Chomsky.

bq. Posted by Noam Chomsky

I wouldn’t have guessed that Noam Chomsky calls Noam Chomsky “Noam Chomsky”, but if it’s good enough for Rickey Henderson I guess it’s good enough for the Noam.

Hat tip: “NicoPitney”:http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/3/24/223959/120 over at Kos.

Does anyone know if there’s a free electronic copy of Moore’s _Principia Ethica_ online anywhere? It should be out of copyright, so there’d be no legal reason it wouldn’t be posted, but maybe no one thought it important enough to convert to electronic form. I wanted to cut and paste some long sections because I got interested in the role of necessity and a priority in Moore’s meta-ethical views, and it would be more convenient to (a) not have to transcribe things and (b) be able to refer readers immediately to the passages I’m talking about.

Does anyone know if there’s a free electronic copy of Moore’s _Principia Ethica_ online anywhere? It should be out of copyright, so there’d be no legal reason it wouldn’t be posted, but maybe no one thought it important enough to convert to electronic form. I wanted to cut and paste some long sections because I got interested in the role of necessity and a priority in Moore’s meta-ethical views, and it would be more convenient to (a) not have to transcribe things and (b) be able to refer readers immediately to the passages I’m talking about.

Wednesday’s “papers blog”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Opp/ is up, with papers by Alex Byrne (on (non)conceptual content), Alexander Pruss (on design and function), John Dilworth (on musical creativity), Peter Vranas (a review of John Doris’s book on character) and, concluding our series of APA preprints, Kent Bach (on referring and not referring).

There will be a break in the papers blog while I’m away at the APA Pacific. The next entry will be on Monday March 29. Since I get back into Boston mid morning Monday from a redeye flight, it might be posted quite late on Monday.

Over at Anggarrgoon, “Claire”:http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/anggarrgoon/2004/03/23#a63 is worried about losing the hidden benefits of graduate school.

bq. I finished my dissertation today. … What excuse will I use now when I try to eat cereal with a fork? or have no clean clothes? or when I eat porridge for dinner? probably that I’m making the most of it before I stop being a grad student and have to be respectable… , dissertations are so useful….

Here’s a true story. When I was reading that a few hours ago, all the talk of food made me kinda hungry. So I headed over to the kitchen, washed a bowl, pulled out the cereal box, and then looked at the clock and realised a bowl of cardboard-flavoured cereal wasn’t what I needed at that time of day. But had I not noticed the clock, I think I’d think that being an academic would have been a pretty good excuse in the circumstances. So provided the job market for Australian linguists is as strong as it should be, Claire will have all the excuses she needs for a long long time.

More seriously, congratulations to Clare on finishing the thesis. I wonder how many people there are so far who have finished a PhD while maintaining an academic blog?