Richard Zach has posted the schedule for the LogBlog: Logic Education Session at the San Francisco APA/ASL meeting this Saturday that I, along with Richard, Michael Glanzberg, Andy Arana and Ted Sider will be part of. I can’t promise it will be laugh-a-minute stuff but it should be useful and informative. And it is a Good Thing to have more discussion of philosophical teaching at places philosophers gather en masse.

Richard Zach has posted the schedule for the LogBlog: Logic Education Session at the San Francisco APA/ASL meeting this Saturday that I, along with Richard, Michael Glanzberg, Andy Arana and Ted Sider will be part of. I can’t promise it will be laugh-a-minute stuff but it should be useful and informative. And it is a Good Thing to have more discussion of philosophical teaching at places philosophers gather en masse.

Via “Certain Doubts”:http://bengal-ng.missouri.edu/~kvanvigj/certain_doubts/index.php?p=276, the schedule for the “Rutgers Epistemology Conference”:http://www.philosophy.rutgers.edu/EVENTS/EPIS2005/program.html is now online. Here are the papers.

* Gilbert Harman, “The Problem of Induction”:http://www.philosophy.rutgers.edu/EVENTS/EPIS2005/PAPERS/Harman.pdf
* Jennifer Lackey, “Learning From Words”:http://www.philosophy.rutgers.edu/EVENTS/EPIS2005/PAPERS/Lackey.pdf
* Keith DeRose, “Bamboozled by Our Own Words: Semantic Blindness and Some Arguments Against Contextualism”:http://www.philosophy.rutgers.edu/EVENTS/EPIS2005/PAPERS/DeRose.pdf
* Elizabeth Fricker, “Knowledge from Trust in Testimony is Second-hand Knowledge”:http://www.philosophy.rutgers.edu/EVENTS/EPIS2005/PAPERS/Fricker.pdf
* Richard Fumerton, “Direct Realism”:http://www.philosophy.rutgers.edu/EVENTS/EPIS2005/PAPERS/Fumerton.pdf

And Keith has posted “an updated version of his paper”:http://pantheon.yale.edu/%7Ekd47/Bamboozled.pdf.

Sally Haslanger has put together a very useful site with information about the union boycott at the St Francis (site of the Pacific APA).

“Haslanger’s ‘Stand for Justice’ site”:http://www.mit.edu/~shaslang/other/PAPAlabor.html

Through it I saw a link to the APA’s site about the various locations that people are moving papers to around SF.

bq. “Alternative Pacific Meeting”:http://www.apa.udel.edu/apa/governance/alternativepacificmeeting.asp
“Meetings at Drake”:http://www.apa.udel.edu/apa/governance/drakesite.asp
“Meetings at Maxwell”:http://www.apa.udel.edu/apa/governance/maxwellsite.asp

These sites may be updated frequently, check back for more info. Note that the Drake and Maxwell hotels are short walks away from the St Francis, and sessions moved there are being held at the same time as they were originally scheduled. This goes a long way towards addressing the logistical concerns I raised earlier. There’s still a worry about getting the news out, and three cheers for the APA for using its website to promote what could have been construed as rival sessions.

By the way, these alternative meeting places cost money, so if you’re going to those sessions – or even if you’re not but support what they are doing – I suspect chipping in some money would be appreciated. I don’t know who has made the payments right now, but in case there’s a hat being passed around in San Francisco it would be good to help out if you support these moves.

I don’t normally pay much attention to blogrolls, either mine or other people’s, but I decided to tinker with mine a little yesterday. It mostly involved clearing out blogs I don’t read much, but I did add one – “Doing Things with Words”:http://dtww.blogspot.com/, that I’ve been frequently linking on the sidebar. I particularly liked today’s post on “the lack of reasonable conservatives in the philosophy-blogtropolis”:http://dtww.blogspot.com/2005/03/where-are-all-reasonable-conservative.html. In the spirit of this link, here’s today’s 10 random songs from iTunes list.

Small Stakes – Spoon
In the Core of a Flame – Go-Betweens
Tickets to What You Need – Badly Drawn Boy
Low – R.E.M.
Dog on Wheels – Belle and Sebastian
Brand New Ways – Paul Kelly
Everything Means Nothing to Me – Elliot Smith
Disco 2000 – Pulp
Satisfied Mind – You am I
Gathering Moss – Super Furry Animals

From the promo for this week’s 60 Minutes. (Heard on TV not online so no link.)

bq. Their culture has no concept of time, so how did they know it was time to flee before the tsunami hit?

I can’t imagine they’ll give us _any_ evidence that the culture has no concept of time, but maybe I’m just too pessimistic about 60 Minutes’ abilities.

In my 20th Century Analytic class, I’m up to the stage of the _Investigations_ where Wittgenstein makes some hard to interpret claims about the role of philosophy, leading up to the (in)famous claim that if anyone put forward philosophical theses no one would disagree with them. (I’m taking the relevant section to be paragraphs 109 to 133.) For a while I had no idea what he was meaning, but eventually I came up with some some batch of views that, if you attribute them to Wittgenstein, make decent sense of the passage. I wrote up a “handout on this interpretation”:http://brian.weatherson.org/wop.pdf that I’d be interested in knowing what people think.

The short version is that if you read Wittgenstein as believing a lot of the things that my colleague to be “Matti Eklund”:http://spot.colorado.edu/~eklundm/home.htm believes, but thinks that it is only the business of philosophy to raise paradoxes not to solve them, then the passage makes tolerable sense. More details on “the handout”:http://brian.weatherson.org/wop.pdf.

Two quick disclaimers. First, I’m not a Wittgenstein scholar, so for all I know there are very good reasons to not say what I say. (Or it is thought to be trivially correct as an interpretation.) Second, although I use free will as my example of a philosophical dispute to illustrate Wittgenstein’s views on disputes, I don’t mean to commit to anything about free will. What I say about free will is pretty clearly too simplistic to be true, though I think it’s on the right track.

The other day I posted “a letter about the threatened closure”:http://tar.weatherson.org/archives/004227.html of “the HPS department at Eötvös Loránd University”:http://hps.elte.hu/, along with a “petition you can sign protesting the closure”:http://www.petitiononline.com/mod_perl/signed.cgi?hpselte&1. This got a little buried in the APA discussions, so I thought I’d bump it to the top, along with providing some information about the department I was given by my colleague Zoltan Szabo.

bq. If I understand the situation correctly, the chair of the HPS department at the Faculty of Sciences (Professor Kampis) was asked to specify who in his department should lose his job, which he refused to do. As a reaction, the deans decided to dissolve the department. By law, they had to do that by March 1 if they want anyone to be fired by September 1. So, there is a chance that the decision is a bluff: they just want the chair to back down, and once he consents to firing a few people the department will be reinstated. But nobody really knows.

So it’s possible that a loud show of support for the department will help save some philosophers’ jobs.

The department’s “website”:http://hps.elte.hu/ is in English so you can get a sense of who is involved and what kind of work they do. Many of the pages on the “faculty list”:http://hps.elte.hu/dept/faculty.html link to pages where the philosophers list their work. The members of the department have published in the top philosophy of science journals, as well as in scientific journals that I believe are well regarded, such as _Foundations of Physics_, _Philosophy of Science_, _British Journal for the Philosophy of Science_, and so on. So there are some good philosophers here who are being threatened.

If you could “sign the petition”:http://www.petitiononline.com/hpselte/petition.html protesting the closure, it would be a small gesture that might prevent this department being closed.

Thanks to Elizabeth Lee for letting me know about this, and to Zoltan Szabo for getting more information about what is happening.

Both posted without comment 🙂

* “Transcript of Harry Frankfurt on the Daily Show”:http://gfp.typepad.com/the_garden_of_forking_pat/2005/03/frankfurt_on_bu.html (via Garden of Forking Paths – thanks to John Fischer for the link)
* “Alternative APA Program”:http://www.usfca.edu/fac-staff/rrsundstrom/altapa.htm

Earlier I passed on a letter about people moving APA Presentations to USF rather than having them in the boycotted Westin hotel. At the time I was passing that on because it seemed like a good idea. Having been prompted to think about this more carefully by Alva Noe, I now think it would be a bad idea. Basically I think for these relocations to be a good idea, one of two conditions would have to be met.

# It is logistically feasible for people who want to attend some sessions at the Westin and others at USF to move easily between them; or
# The interests of people who want to attend sessions at both locations don’t all-things-considered matter.

I don’t really see how 1 can be true. It’s 2 miles between Union Square and USF, which would be too far to walk even if it were safe. (And from experience I can attest to the not particularly secret fact that it isn’t perfectly safe.) So people would have to be getting taxis between the two, at no small expense. And they’d probably still be leaving early or arriving late or both. And all these problems are magnified for anyone in a wheelchair.

This is all assuming that people know where the sessions will be, which in many cases they won’t. (Alva pointed out that the best way to distribute information about where sessions have moved to is via noticeboards in the Westin, which won’t help much those who on principle won’t go in.) If there are many sessions moved I’ll use this site to try and distribute as accurate a picture as possible about where things are – and hopefully we can use other blogs and the APA site to reach even more people than I could – but there will be gaps in the coverage. I don’t think this is a viable situation.

None of this would matter if 2 were true. If, that is, it were true that the interests people have in attending sessions at both places are outweighed by the interests of not setting foot in the Westin Hotel. But I can’t really see that’s true. Philosophers have a legitimate interest in attending the APA. Young philosophers have an interest in having their sessions attended. And the organisers of the APA Pacific (who, recall, routinely put on the best large philosophy conference in the northern hemisphere) have an interest in their conference going ahead as smoothly as possible. I don’t see that the difference it makes to the union’s action between philosophers merely setting foot in the hotel and not doing so overrides those interests.

So my current position is yay on moving hotels (especially to the Drake!), yay on not giving cash to the Westin, yay on not attending things at the hotel other than papers (receptions etc) and nay on moving sessions to USF. I assume I won’t have huge numbers of supporters in this, so there’ll still be plenty happening at USF. In that case I’ll do what I can to pass on information about moved sessions as they arise. (Much thanks to Alva for some e-discussion which helped mt think more clearly about this. That’s not to say _he_ should be blamed for mistakes etc in my reasoning.)