A reminder that Kit Fine will be today’s discussion club speaker at Cornell. He is speaking on “Relatively Unrestricted Quantification” at 4.30 in Goldwin Smith room 142.

Next Friday we have Stephen Yablo on “Non-Catastrophic Presupposition Failure”, also at 4.30 (room to be announced).

A reminder that Kit Fine will be today’s discussion club speaker at Cornell. He is speaking on “Relatively Unrestricted Quantification” at 4.30 in Goldwin Smith room 142.

Next Friday we have Stephen Yablo on “Non-Catastrophic Presupposition Failure”, also at 4.30 (room to be announced).

Via Luka Yovetich in “Majikthise’s comments thread”:http://majikthise.typepad.com/majikthise_/2005/03/admission_decis.html I found “Who Got In”:http://www.whogotin.com/report.php?level=1&sort=program&alpha=P, a site for keeping track of admissions decisions as reported by students. The link is to the page for reports of philosophy offers. I’ve got no idea how reliable it is, so buyer beware, but if it is reliable it is a useful source for finding out which departments have made decisions.

This site just had a very odd little meltdown somehow for reasons I don’t quite understand. Anyway, it all seems to be back working, but in getting it back up to speed I managed to kill one of the rss feeds. (It was, as Austin would insist I say, a mistake rather than an accident that I did so.) Anyone who was using comments.rdf for the feed of the comments on the site should now use “this feed”:http://tar.weatherson.org/comments.xml. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Over at “gfp”:http://gfp.typepad.com/the_garden_of_forking_pat/2005/03/pvis_comments.html there is a discussion about whether most philosophers are libertarians or compatibalists about free will. When reading this I thought it would be fun to do a survey of my readership to find out their views on a range of topics. But I should first find out what questions to ask. I’ve started making a short list below the fold.
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Brian Leiter has started a “comments thread”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2005/03/tenuretrack_hir.html for people reporting news of tenure-track hirings. I’d encourage anyone with news of who they have hired or placed to head over there. Self-reporting is encouraged. (I’ve closed comments here so that all the news is aggregated at Brian’s place.)

“This is old news”:http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S10/80/40G73/index.xml?section=announcements to most people I guess, but it was news to me.

bq. The French-language weekly news magazine Le Nouvel Observateur has named Princeton professors Kwame Anthony Appiah and Philip Pettit two of the 25 greatest thinkers in the world today.

bq. In its Dec. 29, 2004, issue, which celebrates its 40th anniversary, the magazine lauds Appiah as an “ambassador of universalism,” and hails Pettit as a “holistic individualist.” The full list includes other philosophers, social theorists and critics from across the globe.

Much deserved honours, and I’m glad to see analytic philosophers getting this kind of recognition in France (of all places!).

The “papers blog”:http://opp.weatherson.org/archives/004191.html for the day is up. There’s a link to a new page by “Adam Pautz”:http://philrsss.anu.edu.au/people-defaults/adamp/index.php3 which includes not just papers (like lots of sites do) but a rather impressive summary of the project that links the papers together. Some days I wish I could tell a story about how all of my papers fit together, but that’s not really the way I work.

Our February Stats

Unique Visitors – 15161
Visits – 49498
Pages Loaded – 103516
Hits – 128669

I also had over 12000 attempted hits that were denied by the anti-spam defences, but plenty of those attempts were successful.

Here are the most read posts of the month.

“Philosophy in Questionable Taste”:http://tar.weatherson.org/archives/000979.html – 1862
“Most Important Books”:http://tar.weatherson.org/archives/004109.html – 1844
“Benj in _Mind_”:http://tar.weatherson.org/archives/004122.html – 966
“Harry Frankfurt on _The Daily Show_”:http://tar.weatherson.org/archives/004160.html – 738
“Baseball and Assertion”:http://tar.weatherson.org/archives/004127.html – 696
“January Stats”:http://tar.weatherson.org/archives/004112.html – 687
“Matti Eklund”:http://tar.weatherson.org/archives/004154.html – 611

The biggest positive contributor to getting hits is a link from either David Chalmers or Brian Leiter. The second biggest is having an active comments thread. The absence of any substantial philosophy from all but one of my contributions to the above posts is duly noted. From now on, less philosophy more comedy!

I don’t generally post my teaching notes online, and I can’t imagine my undergrad notes would be particularly helpful, but I’m very grateful to those philosophers who do maintain good course websites. This is a roundabout way of noting that this evening I’ve been writing a lecture on the sixth meditation for tomorrow, and the notes from Jim Pryor’s “Introduction to M&E course”:http://www.princeton.edu/~jimpryor/courses/intro/index.html have been incredibly helpful. It’s times like this that I’m very glad the internets exist!