Peter Lasersohn’s paper Context Dependence, Disagreement, and Predicates of Personal Taste is now out in “Linguistics and Philosophy”:http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/klu/ling/2005/00000028/00000006/00000596 (subscription required). This is potentially going to have a big impact on the debates about relativism. Laserhohn used to be a contextualist about taste, but changed to being a relativist, much like my trajectory on conditionals.

My Lewis seminar has been (and will be) discussing whether the role that qualities play in Lewis’s metaphysics, and whether that role could be best played by quantities instead. (Short answer: Yes. The longer answer is being written.) The biggest influence on my thinking on this has been discussions I’ve had with John Hawthorne, but I should also mention a paper by “David Denby”:http://ase.tufts.edu/philosophy/people/denby.shtml called “Determinable Nominalism”:http://www.ingentaconnect.com/search/article?author=denby&year_from=2001&year_to=2006&database=1&pageSize=20&index=24 (subscription required) that discusses many of the motivations for moving away from a pure object/property view towards an object/quantity view. (UPDATE: Denby’s paper is now available “via Tufts”:http://ase.tufts.edu/philosophy/people/Determinable_Nominalism__Philosophical_Studies__vol._103__No.3__February__2001_.doc.)

Metaphysical Mayhem is being transformed this year from a faculty-based conference to something largely directed at grad students. See “here”:http://www.eden.rutgers.edu/~shievak/MM.htm. Something more like the traditional Mayhem is the “Mereology, Topology and Location”:http://www.eden.rutgers.edu/~shievak/MTL.htm conference taking place in October. By Nozick’s ‘closest continuant’ principle, I think I’m tempted to say that the conference called ‘Mereology etc’ _is_ this year’s Mayhem, and the conference called ‘Mayhem’ is a new conference type. Perhaps we should have a conference on conferential identity to work this out.

Finally, frequent TAR commentor Robert Allen has a paper on “The Mereology of Events”:http://www.ifs.csic.es/sorites/Issue_16/allen.htm in the latest “Sorites”:http://www.ifs.csic.es/sorites/Issue_16/index.htm. I don’t think I kept track of _Sorites_ when I ran “OPP”:http://blogs.brown.edu/other/opp/, which was a mistake on my part, but one that I see that Jonathan “has corrected”:http://blogs.brown.edu/other/opp/2006/02/february_17_2006.html.

UPDATE: Two more links.

The latest Philosophical Studies is on bridges between formal and traditional epistemology. From browsing the abstracts some of the bridges seem more elaborately designed on the side of the formal shore, but hopefully there is interesting stuff here. There is obviously a lot of potential for this kind of project (see, for instance, Williamson’s anti-luminosity argument) as long as we take both sides of the river seriously.

At the “Symposium on Gender, Race and Philosophy”:http://stellar.mit.edu/S/project/sgrp/, Elizabeth Anderson’s reply to the comments on her paper “Uses of Value Judgments in Feminist Social Science: A Case Study of Research on Divorce” has now been posted.