Saturday’s “papers blog”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Opp/ is up. The most influential of the papers is sure to be Richard Kraut’s SEP entry on “Plato”:http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato/. There are also papers by Achille Varzi (self-reference), Luis Alonso-Orville (on disjunctive antecedents), Mark Schroeder (on instrumental reason), Harvey Brown and Oliver Pooley (on Minkowski spacetime) and Tim O’Keefe (on Lucretius).

Can I just say I’m stunned how bad my tournament picks have been? I can still do OK as long as I get the next like 30 games right, but ugh. Oh well, here’s some interesting links while I watch my bracket turn to dust.

* “John Holbo”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2004/03/fair_is_foul_an.html on imaginative resistance.
* “Wo”:http://www.umsu.de/wo/archive/2004/03/19/The_Problem_of_Temporary_Extrinsics on the problem of temporary extrinsics.
* “David Edelstein”:http://slate.msn.com/id/2097362/ says that _Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind_ is the best movie he’s seen in a decade. It looked OK from the ads, but best in a decade?

Can I just say I’m stunned how bad my tournament picks have been? I can still do OK as long as I get the next like 30 games right, but ugh. Oh well, here’s some interesting links while I watch my bracket turn to dust.

* “John Holbo”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2004/03/fair_is_foul_an.html on imaginative resistance.
* “Wo”:http://www.umsu.de/wo/archive/2004/03/19/The_Problem_of_Temporary_Extrinsics on the problem of temporary extrinsics.
* “David Edelstein”:http://slate.msn.com/id/2097362/ says that _Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind_ is the best movie he’s seen in a decade. It looked OK from the ads, but best in a decade?

Thanks largely to an obscurely worded link from “the most important philosopher on the internet”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/bleiter/ yesterday was the biggest day in the history of this blog – with somewhere between 1900 and 2800 page views (depending on which counter you believe).

I was worried that some of the new readers would not understand the subtle ironies of this site. So just to be clear, I don’t think Andy’s tournament picks reveal a disposition to akrasia. I do, however, think that Cornell is both the best philosophy school and the best basketball school in America. 24 hours later, the arguments I made for those conclusions just still look compelling.

But it seems basketball posts get all the hits, so here’s another.

Why is it that players are taken out of the game when they get into foul trouble? If they stay in the game, the worst thing that can happen is they foul out. And the cost of fouling out is that you have to spend part of the game on the bench. So to avoid the risk of the player spending a chunk of time on the bench, you make them spend a chunk of time on the bench. This doesn’t obviously make sense.

I can think of three possible explanations, none of them in general very good, although they might work in some cases.

First, minutes at the end of the game are more highly valued than minutes in the middle of the game. So sitting the player down so they can come back at the end is important. The problem is that there’s little evidence I can see that that claim is true. Buckets don’t count more at the end of the game, for instance.

Second, there might be some strategic loss from not having the option of moving the player in or out once they’ve fouled out. But that wouldn’t explain why star players, who would normally play most of the game anyway, sit when they’re in foul trouble. And the strategy coaches actually follow of automatically benching guys when they get in foul trouble seems to lead to just as large a loss of strategic options.

Third, if the player is part of a platoon, where two players rotate in and out of the one spot to each get a reasonable amount of rest, you might not want the other player being forced to cover the last ten or twelve minutes on their own. This one I think does make sense, but only when the players actually are meant to be platooned in this way.

So I think in general coaches would be better off leaving the players in foul trouble in, and telling them to be a bit careful about picking up cheap fouls.

Of course, I’m 11-5 in my selections after day 1 of the tournament, so you might want to ignore everything I have to say about basketball because I clearly still have a lot to learn.

Why were the picks so bad? I always pick 9 seeds over 8 seeds unless there’s a compelling reason, but all 3 8 seeds won today. And I was robbed on Dayton-DePaul. Dayton clearly should have won at the end of the first overtime. That would have made it a semi-respectable 12-4. The good news is that all my second round winners won, so I can still make up for the losses in round 2.

Friday’s edition of the “papers blog”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Opp/ is up, with three new papers by Stephen Schiffer (on paradox, descriptions and justification respectively), a paper by Alexander Pruss arguing that western monotheism is incompatible with standard versions of evolutionary theory, and new entries in the Stanford Encyclopaedia and Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.

The Pruss paper is a little misleading I think, because what’s he really objecting to isn’t the evolution, but the indeterminism. I’ve long thought that if theists wanted to object to one part of modern science, it should be indeterminism, not evolutionary theory. Evolution, after all, undercuts at most two theistic beliefs, and they were pretty implausible to start with. (The two are the literal truth of Genesis and the soundness of the teleological argument. Since Genesis is self-contradictory the first is clearly wrong. And Hume disposed of the teleological argument a century before Darwin.) On the other hand, indeterminism seems to imply that God isn’t really in control.[1] And that seems to really be inconsistent with the theological picture.

fn1. Pretend there’s a long discussion of middle knowledge here that deals with all possible objections to the previous claim but ends up concluding that, as always, I’m 110% correct.

Just for historical purposes, I’m moving my old blog entries (from before I was even on Blogger) onto this site. The old posts should be showing up in the monthly archives shortly. There’s sure to have been lots of linkrot, but there’s some interesting content in various places.

Syracuse is making their first-rounder much more interesting than I’d like, especially with Hakim Warrick on three fouls. But they’ve come back from 11 down to tie it before half-time.

The “papers blog”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Opp/ is online for Thursday, a little belatedly, but with lots of content. There’s the note on Davidson by Gil Harman I mentioned last night, a paper by Simon Keller on virtue ethics, a paper by Øystein Linnebo on the context principle, and three papers by William Larkin on wide content. Also Richard Davis has posted his thesis on counterpossibles, theism and necessity, and there are three reviews from Metapsychology Online.

“Matt”:http://mattweiner.net/blog/archives/000163.html thinks he can jump in the philosophy/basketball competition. Not so fast. Below is the __definitive__ take on how to confuse philosophy with basketball, with a surprise twist at the end.
Continue reading →

More APA previews to present, this time Gil Harman’s wonderful “contribution to the symposium on Donald Davidson”:http://www.princeton.edu/~harman/Papers/Davidson.html. Here’s an excerpt.

bq. I first met Davidson at the American Philosophical meeting in December 1963 when he presented his paper, “Action, Reasons, and Causes,” a paper which contains the germ of many of the ideas he developed in the following years. I next saw him in the summer of 1965. I was teaching a course at Berkeley that summer. Hearing that Paul Grice was running a weekly seminar at Stanford, Tom Nagel, Barry Stroud, Tom Clark and I drove down to attend. In the seminar, Paul presented an early version of “Logic and Conversation,” with Davidson regularly asking for clarifications, “because otherwise what you say will just go in one ear and out the other.” Various other philosophers were at the seminar, including Michael Dummett, who later presented his own “antirealism” in opposition to Davidson’s “realism.” (However, I believe that at this time the big issue between them was whether Michael would go surfing with Davidson.)

I’ve linked to this before, but if you haven’t seen it you really should read Ernie Lepore’s “interview with Donald Davidson”:http://philosophy.berkeley.edu/interview.html that covers all sorts of topics about Davidson’s philosophy and life.

I should have mentioned this in the papers blog post this morning, but Matt Weiner has posted his “APA paper”:http://mattweiner.net/blog/archives/000159.html. And Jonathan Sutton, his commentator, has posted the comments – in the comments. (This is so philosophy-blog-geek-cool that I can barely write straight.)

Matt’s defending the “Boo Closure!” response to the preface paradox, though he doesn’t put it that way. Here’s a related challenge for readers. Can you come up with a list of names such that (a) for each person on the list you intuitively do know they will be in Pasadena and (b) you intuitively don’t know that they will all be in Pasadena? I’m tempted to say that the list of people I mentioned on my APA schedule is such a list, but I have to think harder about what my intuitions are to be really sure about that.