I thought it would be useful to pass on this letter by Phillip Gaspar that “Brian Leiter just posted”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2005/03/possible_change.html.

bq.. Dear Colleague:

The American Philosophical Association is currently considering moving its Pacific Division meeting, scheduled for the end of this month, from the Westin St. Francis hotel in San Francisco, to a hotel in San Jose, because of a continuing labor dispute.

The Westin St. Francis is one of a group of San Francisco hotels that has been involved in a dispute over a new contract with its employees since last August. Hotel profit margins have increased in recent years, but management wants to cut health care benefits and grant only minimal wage increases that will not keep up with inflation. In the fall, the hotels locked out their workers for several weeks and threatened to cancel their health benefits, only relenting after considerable public pressure and direct intervention by San Francisco’s mayor, Gavin Newsom. Nonetheless, by the time the lockout ended, many hotel workers had already received eviction and foreclosure notices. Since then, negotiations with the union representing the hotel workers, UNITE HERE Local 2, have stalled.

In the face of management intransigence, Local 2 has called for the public to boycott all hotels involved in the dispute, including the Westin St. Francis. In response, several conferences and meetings have been moved from San Francisco to other locations in recent weeks, including the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians. Not only is the boycott still likely to be in place by the time of the APA meeting but according to the union, the labor situation is unstable and could deteriorate further. Our meeting could therefore very possibly be disrupted. (For more information on the labor dispute see “http://www.unitehere2.org/”:http://www.unitehere2.org/ and “http://www.hotelworkersunited.org/”:http://www.hotelworkersunited.org/.)

If the APA Pacific Division meeting is held at the Westin St. Francis as scheduled, it is likely that a significant number of people due to participate in or planning to attend the conference, will feel duty-bound to honor the union boycott and cancel their appearances.

Some APA members will also feel an obligation to join union informational pickets outside the hotel calling on others to respect the boycott. If the meeting goes ahead at the St. Francis it is therefore likely that the program will be much weaker than planned and the outcome will be divisive.

While there are certainly logistical difficulties in moving the meeting at this late date, the APA is currently engaged in negotiations with the Fairmont hotel in San Jose, which may be prepared to pay the conference cancellation fee at the St. Francis.

It is almost as easy to get to San Jose from the San Francisco and Oakland airports, as it is to get to San Francisco. Hotel reservations at the St. Francis can still be canceled with no penalty. Some people may already have made non-refundable reservations at other hotels in San Francisco, but it may be possible for the APA to consider setting up a fund to compensate people in this situation if the meeting is moved, particularly graduate students.

If the APA is able to move the meeting venue to San Jose, we will not only be able to honor the union boycott, but we will be much more likely to have a successful conference than if we remain in San Francisco. The Pacific Division is currently contacting people on the conference program to see whether they would support a move. If you agree that we should move the meeting, please contact the APA Pacific Division officers and the APA executive director as soon as possible to let them know this. Their email addresses are listed below.

Please forward this message to others who you know will be attending the APA Pacific Division meeting. (Apologies to anyone who receives this more than once.)

Sincerely,

Phil Gasper
Professor of Philosophy
Notre Dame de Namur University
Belmont, CA 94002

apa_execdirector at UDel.Edu
dreyfus at cogsci.berkeley.edu
jeffrie.murphy at asu.edu
jannas at u.arizona.edu
asilvers at sfsu.edu
normore at humnet.ucla.edu
sgoering at u.washington.edu
mejubien at ucdavis.edu
ndsmith at lclark.edu
dom.lopes at ubc.ca

I’d been loosely following the “Heart of Philosophy”:http://www.heartofphilosophy.com/about.html events through “Melbourne Philosopher”:http://melbournephilosopher.blogspot.com/2005/03/heart-of-philosophy-event-on-beauty.html but I was pretty surprised when I opened up the front page of “the newspaper”:http://theage.com.au today and saw a link to “an article on pub philosophy”:http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2005/03/08/1110160824974.html. When I was at Syracuse there was plenty of philosophy in the pub, well at least there were plenty of philosophers in pubs, but we never got talked about in the newspapers. I’m not sure what I’d think about the content at these events, but I’m pleased to see this level of interest in philosophy being generated and responded to.

Brad has “good advice”:http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2005-3_archives/000485.html for students writing essays.

bq.. The typical easy-to-correct mistakes that the students who come to see me are making seem to be two:

# Nobody ever told them–or they have forgotten, or they are too stressed for time–to _revise_. They are handing in first drafts.
# Nobody ever told them that if you are going to hand in a first draft, an easy way to significantly improve it is to, when you are finished, cut the last paragraph from the paper and paste it at the beginning. Your final sum-up paragraph–written at the end, as you have by trying to write down what you think discovered what you really do think–is almost always going to make a better first paragraph than the first paragraph that you wrote.

The schedule for the “2005 Formal Epistemology Workshop”:http://socrates.berkeley.edu/%7Efitelson/few/schedule.html is now posted, with many of the papers available online. I didn’t know this until after today’s “papers blog”:http://opp.weatherson.org was done, so they aren’t included there, but they will be processed shortly.

The FEW this year is a 5 day extravaganza. I guess it makes sense that it is big being in Texas. I was particularly pleased to see that Jim Pryor is on the program – the more interaction there is between leading figures in mainstream epistemology and formal epistemology the better it will be for the discipline I think. There are a lot of very smart young philosophers and friends of TAR (overlapping groups I hope) there, so it looks like it would be fun to get along to.

This post is largely a question about “a post on local reduction”:http://www.logicandlanguage.net/archives/2005/03/tonk_and_local_1.html on the new blog “logicandlanguage”:http://www.logicandlanguage.net/. Since it mostly reveals my ignorances, I’ll put it below the fold.
Continue reading →

This post is largely a question about “a post on local reduction”:http://www.logicandlanguage.net/archives/2005/03/tonk_and_local_1.html on the new blog “logicandlanguage”:http://www.logicandlanguage.net/. Since it mostly reveals my ignorances, I’ll put it below the fold.
Continue reading →

I’m sure many of you will know about “Philosophy Talk”:http://www.philosophytalk.org/, Ken Taylor and John Perry’s philosophy radio show out of Sacramento San Francisco. What I suspect fewer readers will know about is “The Philosopher’s Zone”:http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/philosopher/index/chrono.htm, a Radio National (Australia) weekly radio show. It’s only been going a few episodes so far, and it seems to be fairly Sydney-centric (but isn’t everything?) but it looks pretty interesting. Sadly the archives are not online, but future shows should be available through streaming audio.

Thanks to the “Melbourne Philosophy wiki”:http://melbournephilosophy.com:8080/jspwiki/ for the link.

UPDATE: Christopher Grau pointed out to me that “this philosophy radio site”:http://www.angelfire.com/ego/philosophyradio/ maintains links to a large number of sources of philosophy on the radio, from the BBC, NPR and many other sources. Lots of listening pleasure!

From Michael Huemer’s entry on “sense data”:http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sense-data/ in the SEP.

bq. For instance, an overdose of LSD might cause me to have an experience of seeming to see a pink rat on this table, where there is in reality nothing pink-rat-like.

I was always told that was the kind of reaction you get to a _normal_ dose of LSD, and in an _overdose_ you end up in a coma with no sense data worth reporting. But maybe I should be deferring to those better informed!

At dinner last night, Kit Fine mentioned that the following modal principle can be found in Aristotle. (I think he said it is in _Metaphysics_ Theta, but I could be misremembering.)

A: L (MA -> MB) -> L (A -> B)

As always here, we use L for box and M for diamond. The boxes here take narrow scope with respect to the main arrow.

He also said that A plus KT leads to modal collapse. That is, with those three principles, you can prove p Lp. This is true, but it’s actually quite a bit harder than it may first appear. So the entire point of this post is to give those of you who like Saturday morning logic puzzles a logic puzzle to work on: prove p Lp in the logic KTA.

Kit also said that the logic KA, without T, has a number of interesting properties, but trying to reproduce what was said at dinner on the blog would be pointless I fear, so you’ll have to wait until he writes about that.

I don’t really participate much in meme-spreading throughout the blogworld, but I’m so addicted to lists that I couldn’t help but play along with these two.
Continue reading →