Lots of stuff happening around the web.

* Congratulations to Jonathan Schaffer on being “appointed to RSSS”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2007/03/jonathan_schaff.html. It’s hard to think of higher praise for Jonathan than to say that this is an entirely fitting and deserved appointment, and I’m very pleased that RSSS is continuing its tradition of hiring the very best philosophers in the world.
* Like “Ross”:http://metaphysicalvalues.blogspot.com/2007/03/shrinking-block.html, I’m puzzled why there isn’t more discussion of the shrinking block theory of time in the literature.
* “John Greco”:http://theblog.philosophytalk.org/2007/03/two_skeptical_a.html discusses some sceptical arguments over at Philosophy Talk. I think that what I’ve been calling the _exhaustive argument_ is simpler and (to me at least) more interesting than the more subtle arguments John discusses. The exhaustive argument says that for some sceptical hypothesis _sh_, you can’t know _~sh_ a priori, and you can’t know it a posteriori, and all knowledge is a priori or a posteriori, so you don’t know it. A lot of interesting epistemology can be classified by how it responds to that argument.
* There is a new edition of “Analysis”:http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/anal;jsessionid=3c2tdjuo17bwk.victoria out featuring Alan Hajek and David Chalmers on conditionals, and John Hawthorne on binding, among many other interesting papers. (How I miss the days when a new edition of _Analysis_ meant I could blog about each paper in it…)
* Some psychologists have been working on how much you can tell about a person from their musical tastes. Here is an “online quiz”:http://www.outofservice.com/music-personality-test/ that they have developed. (HT: “Mixing Memory”:http://scienceblogs.com/mixingmemory/2007/03/what_does_your_music_say_about_1.php.)
* “Aidan”:http://aidanmcglynn.blogspot.com/ and his commentators have been discussing the most important books and articles of recent times. Nothing by anyone on TAR yet, though presumably the lists will be expanding.
* Via “Tapped”:http://www.prospect.org/weblog/2007/04/post_3299.html#016094, some “disturbing”:http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/g/a/2007/03/29/violetblue.DTL&type=printable “articles”:http://www.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/2007/03/28/kathy_sierra/index.html about sexist hate speech on the web. One of the common arguments by first amendment absolutists is that the right response to bad speech is more speech. But one big problem cases like this bring up (and Ishani has been saying something similar in her work for a while now) is that in practice the obligations to produce the more speech are (a) inequitably distributed and (b) made harder to satisfy by the bad speech in the first place.
* I’m running out of time to even produce a links post, so three other quick links. “Robbie on fundamental and derivative truths”:http://metaphysicalvalues.blogspot.com/2007/03/fundamental-and-derivative-truths-x.html, “Ross on rejection notes”:http://metaphysicalvalues.blogspot.com/2007/03/dear-john-thank-you-for-your-paper.html and “Wo on non-rigid atomic expressions”:http://www.umsu.de/wo/archive/2007/03/22/Non_rigid_atomic_expressions all seemed well worth reading.