I made one mistake in my note on Leiter’s M&E rankings yesterday. Texas is actually fifth, behind Notre Dame at outright fourth. My apologies for that.

As Aidan notes in the comments on that post, the rankings do come attached with the following disclaimer.

bq. This measure obviously favors large departments (which can cover more areas) and does not discriminate between the relative importance and prestige of sub-fields within the metaphysics and epistemology category.

There’s a suggestion that this makes up for some of my criticisms. I rather think it doesn’t – it still looks like a junk stat to me. Much more as to why under the fold.

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Brian Leiter is “previewing”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2006/10/another_pgr_pre.html various gourmet report nuggets. The news today concerns a rather odd measure.

bq. This year, we set up the survey to calculate the mean for each faculty across all the areas of “metaphysics and epistemology” evaluated: in other words, the mean score across philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophical logic, philosophy of action, and philosophy of religion.

The top department is Oxford, naturally enough. Tied for 2nd are NYU and Rutgers. Again that’s fair enough, though personally I’m surprised by the size of Oxford’s lead. Anyway, after that it gets odd. Tied for fourth are Notre Dame and Texas. Look, there are really good people working in M&E at ND and Texas. But it’s pretty odd to think these departments are better at M&E than Princeton or MIT. (Those depts are tied for 6th with the St Andrews/Stirling joint program.)

I think this is a quirk of the measure. Princeton and MIT might both rank close to 0 on philosophy of religion. (I don’t know how well MIT would have done on philosophy of action. I think Richard Holton’s work should be considered really important work on action theory, but I’m not sure whether it is so considered around the world.) Even if they are substantively better than ND and Texas on the other six categories mentioned, that may be enough to lower them in the average.

Anyway, I think the Leiter rankings as a whole are a pretty useful measure. And I think the speciality-by-speciality rankings are pretty useful. But I don’t think these averages tell us much at all. By the time we’ve got a ranking that includes both language and religion, we may as well be looking at entire department rankings.

In the corridor I just saw a really nicely designed poster advertising the inaugural David Lewis lecture. I hadn’t even known there was such a thing as a David Lewis lecture, so this was pleasing to discover. The inaugural lecturer is Frank Jackson, which is a good choice, and he is talking on “A Priori Biconditionals and Metaphysics”. The talk is at 4pm, on October 27, in Robertson Hall, Bowl Two at Princeton.

There doesn’t seem to be a prominent ad for the lecture as such on the “Princeton philosophy”:http://philosophy.princeton.edu/ webpage. But poking around their “events section”:http://philosophy.princeton.edu/events.html I discovered that on the same day, Steffi Lewis is doing a talk at 12.30 on “Lewis and the Christians”.

Happily, I’ll be in New Jersey that weekend, so if all goes to plan I’ll be able to go to both talks. I’m very pleased that Princeton has created a Lewis lecture, and I’m looking forward to seeing Frank deliver it.

PS: If you Google “David Lewis Lecture”, you find at least two lecture series with that title: one in classics at Oxford, and one in architecture at Carnegie Mellon. Now a philosophy lecture series to join that group.

Great news for one of my current affiliations: Nottingham looks like it’s jumped four places in this year’s Philosophical Gourmet Report (see Brian Leiter’s PGR highlights), to equal ninth place in the UK.

Corine Besson (a recent PhD graduate of Oxford) is the winner of the competition for a paper by a graduate student or recent graduate to be presented at the Arche Basic Knowledge Workshop this November. Her paper is entitled ‘Logical Knowledge and Gettier Cases’, and argues that knowledge of logical rules based on semantic or conceptual understanding of the logical constants is Gettierizable.

Duncan Pritchard has also posted an interesting-looking draft of his paper for the workshop, entitled ‘Knowledge and Value‘.

A few things to promote while we deal with the joy from seeing another Yankees season end unsuccessfully.

* Alex Doonesbury is now attending MIT, and as “Kai von Fintel points out”:http://www.semantics-online.org/2006/10/stata-in-the-comics that means the Stata Center is now immortalised in a comic strip.

* “Brian Leiter reports”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2006/10/sixmonth_morato.html that Nous and PPR are not accepting new submissions for six months. I’m rather disappointed in this news for several reasons, but I guess we’ll just have to live with it.

* “Flinders University researchers report”:http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/heres-why-you-hate-mondays/2006/10/06/1159641511693.html that if you don’t sleep in on weekends, you feel better on Mondays and Tuesdays.

* If you are in the United States, the “deadlines to register to vote”:http://www.mydd.com/story/2006/10/4/172322/483 are coming up soon. Several of us around here at TAR have no voting rights at all, but it would be a shame if TAR readers were non-voters too.

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A physicist holds forth on the boundries of science.

(Wait a minute, that’s not physics…)

Lots of stuff happening around the internets.

Crooked Timber’s Henry Farrell has created an “academic blogs wiki”:http://www.academicblogs.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page. If you think your blog should be listed, head on over there and add it. There are empty wiki pages for describing each of the blogs, so if you’d like to, say, add a description for “TAR”:http://www.academicblogs.org/wiki/index.php?title=Thoughts_Arguments_and_Rants&action=edit, you could do that too.

Richard Heck has created “a Greasemonkey script”:http://frege.brown.edu/heck/linux/programs/grease.php for altering the appearance of NDPR. If you love the NDPR content, but would like some control over how it appears, now you can have that control.

Carrie is too modest to mention it here, but some of her work has been written up in “The Australian”:http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20481788-12332,00.html. Apparently there have even been some radio appearances following this up. Why the media is more interested in flirting than in the details of epistemological analyses is a bit of a mystery to me.

The Guardian has a “very good obituary”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,1884313,00.html for Jonathan Cohen, who died last week. (Via “Brian Leiter”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2006/10/in_memoriam_l_j.html.)