“Hugh Mellor”:http://www.dar.cam.ac.uk/~dhm11/ has posted a link to a David Lewis paper (more a discussion note really) that I had not previously seen.

bq. “Ern Malley’s Namesake”:http://www.dar.cam.ac.uk/~dhm11/ErnMalley.html

“Brian Leiter”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/archives/bleiter/000925.html reports that Jeff King has accepted the offer to move from UC Davis to USC. He says this might move USC into the top 3 in philosophy of language. So that got me thinking, what are the best schools in philosophy of language? Rutgers, Michigan, Stanford and NYU all deserve very strong consideration, as does this fall’s manifestation of USC. And, to toot our own horn a little, so does Cornell as it will be in a few months time, with Delia and Zoltán and __moi__ working directly in philosophy of language, and many other members of the department working in very closely related areas.

One of the difficulties in evaluating how strong a school is in philosophy of language is that in the ideal case, a large chunk of the strength will reside in the linguistics department. Of course the same issue arises in many other areas, including ancient philosophy, philosophy of law, political philosophy and many areas of philosophy of science. It’s a difficulty in performing any measurements because what matters is not just how strong the linguistics program is, but how strong they are in philosophically relevant areas (especially semantics) and how much contact philosophy students have with the relevant people in linguistics. Perhaps one can from the outside how strong in semantics a program is, but it’s hard to tell without first-hand evidence how much interaction between philosophy and linguistics there is. This is perhaps one of those variables that can’t be measured by something like the Leiter report, but which a prospective graduate student should investigate for themselves before choosing a school.[1]

In principle, the strength of the linguistics program, especially in semantics, could affect the relative standing of quite a few philosophy programs in philosophy of language. This consideration makes Stanford even more attractive in philosophy of language, and also helps MIT, UMass Amherst, UC Santa Cruz and, I think, Cornell. (And probably several others that I’ve forgotten about.)

fn1. This isn’t intended in any way as a criticism of the report. As Brian often points out, there are more factors relevant to choosing a graduate school than what can be measured by the report. This is just one of those factors.

Very sad news today. Susan Moller Okin, author of __Women in Western Political Thought__, __Justice, Gender and the Family__ and __Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?__ has died at 57. Here is the obituary notice from the “Stanford News Service”:http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/pr/04/obitokin310.html.

I never met Professor Okin, and I don’t know enough about her work to comment with any credibility, but everyone I know who knew of her and/or her work reported glowingly on each. Many more details can be found in the Stanford notice linked above.

Professor Okin worked closely with the “Global Fund for Women”:http://www.globalfundforwomen.org/, and her family has requested that donations in her memory be made to them.

Every year the Philosophers’ Annual makes its selection of the best ten philosophy papers from the past year and republishes them in a separate volume. (I think the republishing will be electronic this year.) A couple of members of the board of the Philosophers’ Annual, which chooses the papers, have written to me (I imagine among others) asking for nominations for good papers. One of them suggested that blog readers could assist here.

So, if you have any recommendations for great papers published in calendar year 2003, use the message board to leave a note. No self-nominations please! There’s no immediate time limit on this, but obviously the sooner the better.

“Caoine”:http://caoine.org/mt/archives/2004_03.php#002966 is feeling remarkably generous for an undergraduate. She has decided to donate her 2004 Amazon referrals income to a charity, but can’t decide which one. This seems like a good opportunity to ask blog readers who might know something about this, which charities do provide good value for your donated dollar? I’ve always thought Oxfam was good value, but my evidence for that isn’t entirely overwhelming. (I remember Peter Unger did some investigations and decided they were worth supporting, so that’s some evidence, but that was one data point several years ago.) If anyone has any better suggestions, or reasons why Oxfam isn’t really as good as I’ve always thought, I’d be happy to hear them.

My secret mission to ensure every Brown graduate student has a blog continues apace, though the clock is ticking on whether I can succeed before I leave for the wilds of upstate New York.

bq. “Be That As It May”:http://dcruz.blogspot.com/ by Jason D’Cruz.

Greg Restall has updated his “papers page”:http://consequently.org/writing/, and it now has an “RSS Feed”:http://consequently.org/writing/index.xml! If only everyone in the world was so kind, the papers blog would just write itself.

“David Lewis on the internet”:http://www.david-lewis.org/links.php, via “wo”:http://www.umsu.de/wo/archive/2004/03/07/David_Lewis_and_Google. Wo also has a post up on “impossible fictions”:http://www.umsu.de/wo/archive/2004/03/06/Impossible_Fictions that I need to respond to, once I think of something intelligent to actually say.

“David Lewis on the internet”:http://www.david-lewis.org/links.php, via “wo”:http://www.umsu.de/wo/archive/2004/03/07/David_Lewis_and_Google. Wo also has a post up on “impossible fictions”:http://www.umsu.de/wo/archive/2004/03/06/Impossible_Fictions that I need to respond to, once I think of something intelligent to actually say.

So many things to attend in Pasadena, so little time. Here’s a brief list of which sessions seemed most interesting to me. (Be warned – I have very odd interests, so some objectively interesting things are probably not included. And I have a pro-Brown and pro-Cornell bias.) What follows will look awful in anything less than 1024*768, so if you’re running 800*600 I suggest moving to a higher resolution before clicking the ‘more’ link.

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