Well, I’d finally clean out my email inbox for a start. And I’d read many more of the things in the “papers blog”:http://opp.weatherson.org and “Brad DeLong’s links”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/12/if_i_had_infini_4.html. But instead I’ll just mention a finite number of things that I’d like to spend more time on.

David Wallace, “Language Use in a Branching Universe”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~mert0130/papers/branching.pdf – what should our semantics of tense look like if time happens, as a matter of contingent fact, to be branching? I’d be tempted to start using a MacFarlane-style relativist semantics, which Wallace doesn’t consider. But what he does consider looks fascinating.

Paul Pietroski, “Interpreting Concatenation and Concatenates”:http://www.wam.umd.edu/%7Epietro/research/papers/ICC.pdf – as he says “Some readers may find this shorter but denser version, which ignores issues about vagueness and causal constructions, easier to digest. The emphasis is on the treatments of plurality and quantification, and I assume at least some familiarity with more standard approaches.” I’m not sure that I find ‘shorter and denser’ versions easier to digest, either when we’re talking about stacks of pancakes or semantics papers.

Jeremy Butterfield, “Against Pointillisme about Mechanics”:http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00002553/01/APM1.pdf – an argument that Humean Supervenience can’t handle even the vector quantities of classical mechanics, and in particular that it can’t handle velocity. I’m not sure I follow it all, I’m in particular not sure what he means by ‘perdurantism’, I’d like to be able to follow it all.