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!

The other day I linked to “Richard Rorty’s review”:http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n02/print/rort01_.html of Scott Soames’s “history”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/069112244X/ref=nosim/caoineorg-20 “books”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0691123128/ref=nosim/caoineorg-20 and to “Scott Soames’s response”:http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~grussell/SoamesonRorty4.pdf. Having read them both over a couple of times, I wanted to comment on one of the two issues that was bothering me. (The other is a complicated point about Ryle that I might leave until later, or never.) The short version of the problem is that I don’t understand what Soames’s response is to Rorty’s charge that the central topic of 20th century philosophy isn’t necessity but correspondence. The long version is below the fold.
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If you’re a good Quinean, you want to believe the following two theses.

# The things that best scientific theory quantifies over exist
# Among the things that exist, there do not exist spooks or souls or certainly not _imaginary friends_

So it would be a little troubling if best scientific theory started quantifying over imaginary friends. But “some say that’s what will happen”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1427987,00.html?gusrc=rss. The Quineans will have to find some way to paraphrase away the imaginary friends without paraphrasing away the benefits, should the benefits be genuine!