Over at Fragments, “David Chalmers asks for suggestions for the list of the most important recent-ish books in philosophy of mind”:http://fragments.consc.net/djc/2005/01/books_in_the_ph.html. He seems to like books from long ago, thinking nothing post-1970 matches up with the best 1920-1970 work, and nothing post-1987 matches with the best 1970-1987 work. Is he right?

If I had more time (and a pony) it’d be fun to run a poll to figure out now that we’ve got some critical distance the most highly regarded books in several fields in philosophy. (What about metaphysics, for example? Language? I guess political philosophy is relatively easy, but overall it’s tricksy.) But as it is we’ll have to settle for discussion threads.

PS: No discussion of best philosophy of mind books _here_. All that talk should happen over at “Dave’s place”:http://fragments.consc.net/djc/2005/01/books_in_the_ph.html.

Over at Fragments, “David Chalmers asks for suggestions for the list of the most important recent-ish books in philosophy of mind”:http://fragments.consc.net/djc/2005/01/books_in_the_ph.html. He seems to like books from long ago, thinking nothing post-1970 matches up with the best 1920-1970 work, and nothing post-1987 matches with the best 1970-1987 work. Is he right?

If I had more time (and a pony) it’d be fun to run a poll to figure out now that we’ve got some critical distance the most highly regarded books in several fields in philosophy. (What about metaphysics, for example? Language? I guess political philosophy is relatively easy, but overall it’s tricksy.) But as it is we’ll have to settle for discussion threads.

PS: No discussion of best philosophy of mind books _here_. All that talk should happen over at “Dave’s place”:http://fragments.consc.net/djc/2005/01/books_in_the_ph.html.

One of the effects of academia, especially philosophy, having moved so quickly to establish a presence online is that philosophers can have strikingly high Google rankings. Since a high Google ranking is to the 21st century what an ancient title was to the 20th century, this is worth some note. Obviously most philosophers, except those with particularly common names, are the first Google hit if you search their full name. The issue is how high up you are if you search just one of their names. For instance,

* “Benj”:http://people.cornell.edu/pages/beh24/ is both the first Benj and the first “Hellie”:http://people.cornell.edu/pages/beh24/, which is quite a feat
* “Ishani”:http://philosophy.syr.edu/maitra.html is the second Ishani, and the third “Maitra”:http://philosophy.syr.edu/maitra.html
* “Delia”:http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/research/graff/ is the sixth Delia and the fourth “Graff”:http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/research/graff/

On the slightly less impressive front (though we can work on improvements!) we have

* “Tamar”:http://people.cornell.edu/pages/tsg3/ is the thirty-third Tamar, but the second “Gendler”:http://people.cornell.edu/pages/tsg3/
* I am the one hundred and eleventh “Brian”:http://brian.weatherson.org but the first “Weatherson”:http://brian.weatherson.org

This is mostly to be filed under weekend frivolity, but while I’m here I should note the “papers blog”:http://opp.weatherson.org has been updated.

One of the effects of academia, especially philosophy, having moved so quickly to establish a presence online is that philosophers can have strikingly high Google rankings. Since a high Google ranking is to the 21st century what an ancient title was to the 20th century, this is worth some note. Obviously most philosophers, except those with particularly common names, are the first Google hit if you search their full name. The issue is how high up you are if you search just one of their names. For instance,

* “Benj”:http://people.cornell.edu/pages/beh24/ is both the first Benj and the first “Hellie”:http://people.cornell.edu/pages/beh24/, which is quite a feat
* “Ishani”:http://philosophy.syr.edu/maitra.html is the second Ishani, and the third “Maitra”:http://philosophy.syr.edu/maitra.html
* “Delia”:http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/research/graff/ is the sixth Delia and the fourth “Graff”:http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/research/graff/

On the slightly less impressive front (though we can work on improvements!) we have

* “Tamar”:http://people.cornell.edu/pages/tsg3/ is the thirty-third Tamar, but the second “Gendler”:http://people.cornell.edu/pages/tsg3/
* I am the one hundred and eleventh “Brian”:http://brian.weatherson.org but the first “Weatherson”:http://brian.weatherson.org

This is mostly to be filed under weekend frivolity, but while I’m here I should note the “papers blog”:http://opp.weatherson.org has been updated.

The “APA Pacific program”:http://www.apa.udel.edu/apa/publications/proceedings/v78n3/public/default.asp is now officially online.

Over at Crooked Timber, Kieran Healy has put together “a study of the Gourmet Report voting data”:http://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/003156.html. The striking results are that philosophers agree very strongly on which departments are strongest, and that there is a large difference between how much strength in different areas of philosophy correlates with overall ranking. (From my unbiased perspective in central New York, I think the discipline is shamefully neglecting the importance of ancient and medieval philosophy, but that could just be me.) Lots of stuff to read and highly recommended.

The inaugaural “Aesthetics Anarchy”:http://www.indiana.edu/~aesthete/ conference now has a webpage. I notice that I’m still listed as an invited speaker despite being somewhat short of material. The show they’re putting together there looks lots of fun, and it should be my first trip to the great state of Indiana.

Much much thanks to everyone who has offered suggestions about Wittgenstein and the synthetic a priori. There’s an impressive range of differences of opinion there, so I’ve got lots of lines to follow up. It’s remarkably generous of everyone to be so helpful.

The first entry to the “papers blog”:http://opp.weatherson.org is up for the year. I didn’t put in as many abstracts as I would have ordinarily liked because of time pressures (i.e. being disorganised). And there are some links people sent me over the summer that won’t be added until the next update (probably Thursday). But hopefully there’s some ideas there for everyone’s interest.

I’ve been back a week and the papers blog still isn’t done and this blog isn’t moving far either. I have excuses (snow, campus visits, snow, start of semester, snow, etc) but overall must do better. And we will soon!

In the meantime, I was wondering if anyone knew where I should look for what later Wittgenstein might have written on the synthetic a priori. I’m, to say the least, no Wittgenstein scholar, but it turns out I need to know what Wittgenstein thought about the synthetic a priori for something I’m writing, and I really don’t know where to begin to look. So any help would be more than appreciated!

(The title, by the way, is a by-now-familiar-in-the-blogtropolis shortening of “blog beg”.)

So I’m back in Ithaca, where it is snowing rather heavily. This is slowing down everything I have to do, so I’ve been rather slow in answering emails, updating websites, etc. My apologies for this; I’d really hoped to be on top of things earlier. Hopefully by early next week I’ll be caught up on the things I have to do (track 262 webpage changes for OPP, answer just about as many emails etc.)

The snow is rather magical, in both the positive and the negative senses of that term. Maybe more on this to follow.