The “papers blog”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Opp/ is posted for the day, a little late due to it being the weekend!

I didn’t include it in the papers blog because it isn’t a new paper, but Keith DeRose has posted his 1996 paper “Knowledge, Assertion and Lotteries”:http://pantheon.yale.edu/~kd47/KAL.pdf which might be interesting to many people.

We currently have 115 votes in the “journals survey”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/homepages/weatherson/journals/Journals_Survey.htm – make it 116!

The “papers blog”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Opp/ is up, with papers on _only_ and Dworkin on hard cases. It seems these links to the papers blog lead to another 100 or so hits, so maybe I should keep posting them.

The “journals survey”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/homepages/weatherson/journals/Journals_Survey.htm is ticking along nicely, with nearly 100 votes so far. That’s about as many as I expected, but a few fewer than I’d hoped for. I’m stunned/disappointed with how few votes we’ve had so far from women, as well as from philosophers over 40. Right now it’s basically a survey of what under-40 male philosophers think, which is not the _most_ interesting thing in the world. There are some interesting demographic splits within that group, as well as a slightly unexpected leader in the overall ranking, but I’d like a broader group of voters. I’d still like to get 150 to 200 votes, so if you haven’t voted early, vote anyway!

Lots more to blog about but I’ve been swamped with house-buying paperwork this week, so other obligations are pressing. Maybe more tomorrow.

I occasionally get asked by graduate students for my opinion on the relative quality of various journals. The context is usually that they are interested in finding out which journals would be good to publish in, especially if they are looking to boost their job market credentials. And sometimes the context is that they just like looking at rankings. As I do, from time to time.

So I was interested in a survey Manuel Vargas was running on the quality of various journals. And I decided, with Manuel’s help, to post a web version of it. There’s a link to the survey below.

bq. “Journals Survey”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/homepages/weatherson/journals/Journals_Survey.htm

Obviously this is meant as a bit of fun, not as a serious investigation. And obviously there’s a lot more to choosing which journals to publish in than just the journal quality. (Turnaround time is important, for instance.) But it might be interesting to get a snapshot of what people think.

I’ll post the results, and as much of the raw data as is possible without compromising the confidentiality of survey participants, in a week or so.

UPDATE (11:30): I’ve added a bunch of journals because of suggestions from around the world since the survey was started. If you’re one of the 25 who’ve voted so far, if you go back and just submit votes for the journals that have been added since you voted, it won’t count as a double vote. (I know this is a *very* unscientific practice, but the whole thing was mostly for kicks anyway.)

SECOND UPDATE (10:00am): I’ve added even more journals due to good suggestions coming in. Though from now on I’ll have to be very convinced that there’s good reason to add more, because I better stop spending time on the survey and get back to work. Again, it’s OK to go back and add in evaluations for the journals you answered N/A for the first time, provided you don’t vote for any journal more than once.

There’s been some interesting results so far, but rather than reveal the surprises, I’ll just make a demographic note. The readers of this blog, or at least the survey-taking subset of them, trend strongly young, male and not interested in history of philosophy. TAAR’s marketing department is processing this information as we speak.

This is turning into a trend. In the past few weeks we’ve seen new group blogs started by philosophy graduate students at Syracuse (“Orange Philosophy”:http://www.orangephilosophy.blogspot.com/), Rochester (“What is the Name of This Blog?”:http://urphilosophy.blogspot.com/) and now Brown (“Fake Barn Country”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Blog/).

They all look very interesting, though I’d rather that the Syracuse and Rochester blogs didn’t use Blogger. Last week I did a workshop on blogging at Wesleyan (wonderful people and place, by the way) so I was looking into the possibilities for blog programs. And I was very impressed by “Typepad”:http://typepad.com/. Obviously many readers will know how nice Typepad is, but I hadn’t realised just how user-friendly it is. I was stunned by how easy it is to customise your blog. Admittedly all typepad blogs look kinda alike unless you really get involved with the underlying HTML code, but you can at least make your blog a little distinctive without having to learn any HTML at all. And having integrated comments is obviously a huge advantage over Blogger.

To be sure Typepad is not free. But given the size of these group blogs, the cost of even the most expensive Typepad package will only be a dollar or two per month per blogger. If these blogs are meant to be long-term options, I’d think this is a very worthwhile investment.

UPDATE: To everyone coming over here from Leiter, two quick notes. First, the days are already longer here than they are down in the South. Admittedly not warmer, but at least longer. Second, if you’re a regular reader of philosophy journals, please take the “survey on journal quality”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/homepages/weatherson/journals/Journals_Survey.htm.

We noted last night that some philosophers look like action heros. Well it turns out that with a bit of Photoshopping magic, _all_ philosophers can look like action heros.

bq. “Philosophical Powers”:http://www.geocities.com/krinklyman2/powers.html

Thanks to Raul Saucedo for the (very amusing) link.

I’m sure all the Cool Kids have heard this already, but I only just found out about “Skeewiff’s”:http://skeewiff.com/main.html remix of the Soggy Bottom Boys’ “Man of Constant Sorrow”:http://skeewiff.free.fr/Skeewiffwhereartthou.mp3. That’s a 7.3MB download, but it’s well worth it. It is, at the very least, the best freely available song I’ve heard in a long time. And electronic remixes of bluegrass songs seems like such an obvious idea, I’m surprised it hasn’t been done before. (Or, perhaps more to the point, I’m surprised it hasn’t been brought to _my_ attention before.)

I’m sure all the Cool Kids have heard this already, but I only just found out about “Skeewiff’s”:http://skeewiff.com/main.html remix of the Soggy Bottom Boys’ “Man of Constant Sorrow”:http://skeewiff.free.fr/Skeewiffwhereartthou.mp3. That’s a 7.3MB download, but it’s well worth it. It is, at the very least, the best freely available song I’ve heard in a long time. And electronic remixes of bluegrass songs seems like such an obvious idea, I’m surprised it hasn’t been done before. (Or, perhaps more to the point, I’m surprised it hasn’t been brought to _my_ attention before.)

“David Velleman”:http://www-personal.umich.edu/~velleman/ has posted the full “automated course”:http://blogic.phpwebhosting.com/ that goes along with his nice logic textbook “blogic”:http://www-personal.umich.edu/~velleman/Logic/. It’s got a slightly different focus to competing computer-based logic courses (such as the course in _Language, Proof and Logic_) in that it covers much more material (including modal logic, counterfactuals and probability) but doesn’t go into as much detail in some areas (particularly about proof theory). But I think anyone teaching an introductory logic course would be well advised to look it over and think about whether they want to use it. I hope doing so doesn’t kill David’s bandwidth allowances. I’ve been looking at hosting packages the last few days so I’m getting very sensitive about these things!

On a completely trivial note, the book contains a very tempting teaser of what a picture-book version of _Counterfactuals_ “would look like”:http://www-personal.umich.edu/~velleman/Logic/index.html?4.0.0a.html.

As “Sappho’s Breathing”:http://www.sapphosbreathing.com/archives/000381.html notes, Carlin Romano wrote an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about “two recent collections of autobiographical memoirs by philosophers”:http://chronicle.com/free/v50/i31/31b01301.htm. There’s some interesting, and important points, to be made, so naturally I’d like to start with a cheap joke. Here’s a sample of what we’re likely to see if more philosophers turn their hand to autobiography.

bq. The facility of my pen (I write everything by hand!) has enabled me to produce a system of philosophical thought that is more many-sided, complex, and far-reaching than has been the case with any other living American philosopher. (Nicholas Rescher)

I’d be jealous of Rescher’s philosophical achievement if I wasn’t wittier, more charming, better looking and generally just a more excellent human being than any other living philosopher. “No, really.”:http://mattweiner.net/blog/archives/000063.html

One theme of Romano’s piece is that it might be better if more philosophers worked more autobiography into their philosophy. My first thought was that this was a ridiculous idea. My second thought was that blogging, at least the way some of us do it, seems to deliver just what Romano wants. See, for instance, “this post”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/tar/Archives/002671.html where I work a drinking story into an argument about imaginative resistance. My third thought was that there’s no contradiction between the first two thoughts.

Interestingly, I’ve never been tempted to write a post with such a personal angle on Crooked Timber. This hasn’t been because I’ve had instructions from on high that CT is not to be used for personal posts. It’s just that it has never seemed appropriate to use up the real estate there to tell long stories about the time that I was stuck in an elevator with a circus elephant, or whatever other boring thing might have happened to me that day. It would feel self-indulgent. Since anything I do on a personal blog is self-indulgent, I don’t feel as constrained here.

The more important point raised by Romano’s piece is the very different experience of men and women in academic philosophy. As the commentators at “Sappho’s Breathing”:http://www.sapphosbreathing.com/archives/000381.html note, Romano is possibly not the best choice to have writing about this, but the point still comes through fairly clearly. Here’s a long quote from Martha Nussbaum’s entry in _Singing in the Fire: Stories of Women in Philosophy_ (edited by Linda Martin Alcoff).

bq. Men’s ways of being infantile vary. Some are flirtatious and silly in a relatively harmless way. Some fear old age dreadfully, and believe that continual exercises in seduction will produce something like erotic immortality. Some long to tell you in no uncertain terms that you are a whore, because it makes them feel power. Some hate themselves and have contempt for any woman who is nice to them. Some — and these are the worst, I think — are satanic, by which I mean that they have an emptiness at their core that they fill with exercises in domination, which they market with a frequently dazzling charm.

bq. …

bq. The main problem of feminism in philosophy is the infantile level of human development of many of the men who are in it.

Naturally, I’d like to think that my generation is better than this, though I guess I suspect that if they (we) weren’t (aren’t) I wouldn’t be able to tell.

I do think ‘satantic’ is a wee bit over the top though. I thought demonic possession went out of fashion with witch-burnings.

To my eye the common thread behind Nussbaum’s tropes isn’t misogyny as much as pretty severe depression. That might be disheartening, or it may suggest that there’s a way around the worst of the problems. At least to the extent that we regard depression as effectively treatable. Of course if depression is that big a thread running through philosophy, that’s a story, and one we should be doing something about.

Thanks to Tamar Szab{o’} Gendler for first pointing out the Romano piece to me.

!http://www-philosophy.ucdavis.edu/images/JEFFNO.jpg 150×200! !http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/homepages/weatherson/rock.jpg!