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

“Brian Leiter”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/archives/bleiter/000913.html has some good advice for prospective grad students. I’d agree with all of it, except he hinted that sometimes it’s in your best interests to choose not-Cornell over Cornell. I might write more on this, and on why Cornell always beats not-Cornell, later. Or I might not.

The “papers blog”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Opp/ is up, with a new link and a few new papers. There might be some big news about the papers blog shortly.

I’m a bit behind the curve on this one, but there’s a couple of googlebombs I’d like to help out with: “Jew”:http://www.jewfaq.org/ and “Air America”:http://www.airamericaradio.com/. (For more info on the first of those links, see “Chris Bertram’s”:http://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001631.html comment on Crooked Timber. I’m not linking to the same page as Chris did for reasons given in the comments thread on that page, but hopefully this is still helpful.)

“Syracuse”:http://www.orangephilosophy.blogspot.com/

“Rochester”:http://urphilosophy.blogspot.com/

I got several good ideas for blog posts while I was away last weekend, so I’ll slowly post them over this week.

Last week I somewhat facetiously claimed that the most important characteristic of a philosophy department were its thirty-something faculty members. I suggested by that criteria Cornell was #2 in the world, though several people have insisted since then that #1 would have been a better ranking. Whatever one thinks of the ranking, how important are the 30-ers.

John Doris suggested a nice test for this. Look back over the (recent) history of philosophy and find out which age group has produced the best work. To a first approximation, we can look at the best work published by philosophers in 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s, and see which group does best. (This is approximate because books don’t get written overnight. But it’s a decent approximation.) To kick off, here are some books published by people in their 30s.

G. E. Moore – Principia Ethica
Bertrand Russell – Principia Mathematica[1]
Ludwig Wittgenstein – Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
Saul Kripke – Naming and Necessity[2]
David Lewis – Counterfactuals
David Chalmers – The Conscious Mind[3]

We thirty-somethings miss out by one day on having _Ulysses_ in the list, but some people might question the _philosophical_ importance of _Ulysses_.

If we started listing papers, there would be plenty more to include, including most of David Lewis’s best work. Of course the interest here is in the comparative, so we’d have to note how much good work has been produced by philosophers of other ages to make a real comparison. But I’ll leave that to commentators.

fn1. I know Whitehead co-authored Principia, and I know only vol. 1 was published before Russell’s 40th birthday. So this is a bit of a cheat.

fn2. I’m taking the initial publication in the Harman & Davidson volume to be the important one here, not the re-issue in book form.

fn3. I’m guessing that Dave was 30 when Conscious Mind was published, though for all I know he was younger than that.

I got several good ideas for blog posts while I was away last weekend, so I’ll slowly post them over this week.

Last week I somewhat facetiously claimed that the most important characteristic of a philosophy department were its thirty-something faculty members. I suggested by that criteria Cornell was #2 in the world, though several people have insisted since then that #1 would have been a better ranking. Whatever one thinks of the ranking, how important are the 30-ers.

John Doris suggested a nice test for this. Look back over the (recent) history of philosophy and find out which age group has produced the best work. To a first approximation, we can look at the best work published by philosophers in 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s, and see which group does best. (This is approximate because books don’t get written overnight. But it’s a decent approximation.) To kick off, here are some books published by people in their 30s.

G. E. Moore – Principia Ethica
Bertrand Russell – Principia Mathematica[1]
Ludwig Wittgenstein – Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
Saul Kripke – Naming and Necessity[2]
David Lewis – Counterfactuals
David Chalmers – The Conscious Mind[3]

We thirty-somethings miss out by one day on having _Ulysses_ in the list, but some people might question the _philosophical_ importance of _Ulysses_.

If we started listing papers, there would be plenty more to include, including most of David Lewis’s best work. Of course the interest here is in the comparative, so we’d have to note how much good work has been produced by philosophers of other ages to make a real comparison. But I’ll leave that to commentators.

fn1. I know Whitehead co-authored Principia, and I know only vol. 1 was published before Russell’s 40th birthday. So this is a bit of a cheat.

fn2. I’m taking the initial publication in the Harman & Davidson volume to be the important one here, not the re-issue in book form.

fn3. I’m guessing that Dave was 30 when Conscious Mind was published, though for all I know he was younger than that.

According to “this page”:http://www.apa.udel.edu/apa/divisions/schedule.html the APA Central is scheduled to be held in Chicago the next three years. I don’t mind having a constant venue – if I had my way the Eastern, Pacific and Central conferences would always be held in Miami, San Francisco and New Orleans – but it does seem to be a change of policy.

The “break-up lines post”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/tar/Archives/002593.html continues to be by far the biggest attraction on this page. So I guess it is natural that someone should try and remedy the severe depression this seems to be unleashing with “philosophical pick-up lines”:http://www.cassetteradio.com/useandmisuse/2004_03_01_useandmisuse_archive.html#108077576819375458. I’m not sure it’s natural that the someone turned out to be Allan, but the world is a strange place some days. His commentators don’t seem to be having much luck with generating lines so far though, so head over and leave a few suggestions.

Bonus points: Lines you’ve actually used. Double bonus points: Lines that actually worked. Triple bonus points: Lines that you did use, and didn’t work, but which you can convince people did work.

Slightly after the event, here’s an addendum to the quotes board, all courtesy of Shieva Kleinschmidt.

“Michael is property-intoxicated.”

bq. Linda Wetzel, responding to Michael Jubien’s claim that we are often object-fixated.

“I’m going to kill myself in about 5 minutes. Let me talk about endurantism.”

bq. Laurie Paul, responding to the difficulties for her presentation that were generated by the lack of a functioning overhead projector.

“Dogmatism was bad when Galileo was dismissed dogmatically, but it may not be such a bad idea when responding to your local analytic metaphysician.”

bq. Tom Kelly discussing Moorean facts, in response to a question I asked. I was too busy appearing to pay attention to actually take notes, but this wasn’t the most shocking part of Tom’s answer to me. That was when he claimed his paper wasn’t a _philosophical_ argument and hence was immune to general challenges to philosophical arguments. I don’t know, it sure didn’t look like physics or comp lit or sabermetrics or anything other than philosophy to me.

“I also said it was an embarrassingly simple argument, but it was an open question as to who it’ll embarrass.”

bq. Kent Bach, discussing an argument for the conclusion that almost any expression that can be used to refer isn’t inherently referential.

“There is a rainbow in my heart.”

Ned Markosian before starting his comments on Dean Zimmerman’s paper, and right after telling us that he’d just had his first 3 cups of caffeinated coffee in a long long time.

We’re back. The weekend away from blogging was a lot of fun, but not necessarily because it was away from blogging.

I really hope I wasn’t the only one in the world an hour late (or early) for an appointment because they forgot about daylight savings. There would be a cute joke about the epistemic independence of the de nunc to be made here, if only I were omniscient with respect to the de dicto.

Two new sites for the “papers blog”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Opp/, which by the way is up.

bq. “Wayne Riggs”:http://www.ou.edu/cas/ouphil/faculty/wriggs/abstracts.html
“Patrick Hawley”:http://www.mit.edu/~phawley/papers/

Blogging has been light the last few days because I’ve been on the road, first at Wesleyan and now at Ithaca. It’s lots of fun and I’ll have plenty to write about when I get back to Providence, but for now there won’t be much. (I’m also getting behind on email, but I’ll try and deal with those shortly.) TARand the papers blog should return to normal on Monday.