As some of you will have noticed, WordPress creates a comments feed for every post on this blog. This is kind of neat, but a little impractical for most purposes. So I found where it is storing the comments feed for the entire blog. I’ve now made it available through the cute little button on the sidebar, or it is available “here”:http://tar.weatherson.org/comments/feed/.
Author Archives: brianweatherson
Carbon Neutrality
One of the side effects of travelling so much is feeling guilty about my contributions to global warming. So I started doing a little research into buying carbon credits to offset my carbon contributions to the world. It seemed the best way to do so (in America) was through “Carbonfund”:http://www.carbonfund.org/site/, but my research here was fairly spotty. I’m normally leery about giving money to charities that aren’t that well established, but I think no charities on these lines are going to be well established. Do any readers have any suggestions?
Many Links
Douglas Portmore has started a “journals wiki”:http://wikihost.org/wikis/philjinfo/ to keep track of how well different journals respond to submissions, i.e. the turnaround time, the usefulness of the comments etc. I’m a little worried that people will post their war stories, rather than the times they got a quick (or at least not slow) response from journals. I have a pretty good idea of what the median response time is at a few journals, so we’ll see how this data matches up.
Richard Moran told me about a really cool new resource, “LibriVox”:http://librivox.org/. They collect and distribute audio recordings of books and papers that are in the public domain. Here is their “philosophy”:http://librivox.org/newcatalog/search.php?genre=Philosophy catalog. It includes a few things we’d consider borderline philosophical at best, but it also includes some classics including McTaggert’s “_The Unreality of Time_”:http://librivox.org/unreality_of_time/. It is possible to volunteer to add recordings to the site. They say that _On Denoting_ is in progress. A good version of _Principia Ethica_ would be fun to hear, though the reader would need to get just the _right_ pitch on each of the emphasised words.
On a somewhat lower brow note, two college friends of mine have decided to regenerate their college radio show “Black Forest Radio”:http://www.blackforestradio.com/blog/ as a podcast. It’s not entirely unsafe for work, depending on what kind of workplace you have I guess. (Personally I work in a closed office, so spending the entire day watching cricinfo updates and listening to trashy Australian radio is work-safe. Not that I would ever do that.)
In the meantime, it’s about 60 degrees and sunny here, so I might go for a stroll up Cascadilla Gorge. My desktop has the forecasts for Ithaca and Melbourne, and it says their projected daily maximums are 3 degrees apart. Hopefully Melbourne gets as much rain with these temperatures as Ithaca is getting.
Ending Holidays with Voluntarism
I’m finally back from a long trip away. It involved going via the APA and surviving “the fire”:http://tar.weatherson.org/2007/01/05/apa-hotel-fire/, but mostly I spent the time in Minneapolis. Happily, I didn’t travel anywhere I had to “learn a new language”:http://www.cnn.com/2007/TRAVEL/01/01/australia.slang.reut/index.html. Unhappily, I have about a million emails, papers, etc to get to now I’m back. But before all that, I wanted to mention a story that bears on my arguments for doxastic voluntarism.
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Link City
I’m on the road now (and have been for a while) so access to things like email is a little spotty. Apologies to everyone to whom I’ve been slow in responding. Meanwhile, here are some random things I’ve come across while crying into my beers over the Warne-McGrath retirements.
* I’m going to a conference on Ryle and Ryle-influenced philosophy at “Ryerson University”:http://www.ryerson.ca/dept/philosophy.html next year. The dates aren’t set, but this looks like it should be very enjoyable.
* For this holiday giving season, “Peter Singer”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/17/magazine/17charity.t.html?_r=1&ex=157680000&en=f93281b678aaba14&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink&o had an interesting article in the NY Times about charitable giving. Singer makes some quite practical suggestions for what high income (and that includes I’m sure some readers of this blog) earners should be giving.
* “PEA Soup”:http://peasoup.typepad.com/peasoup/2006/12/notable_ethics_.html has a thread going on notable ethics papers. I’m very grateful to them for putting this up, and following along with interest.
* The call for papers for next year’s “TARK”:http://www.info.fundp.ac.be/~pys/TARK07/ (theoretical aspects of rationality and knowledge) closes relatively soon.
Job Market News
“Brian Leiter”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2006/12/site_for_sharin.html links to “this helpful wiki”:http://wikihost.org/wikis/academe/wiki/philosophy listing which departments have and haven’t contacted candidates concerning interviews at the APA. The good news is that there are still a lot of schools that seem to be still to make phone calls. So there’s still a lot of interview slots to go around. The not-so-good news is that this state of affairs may only last a day or two more.
Anyway, if anyone has info (i.e. they’ve heard from one of the schools on the ‘waiting for info’ list) feel free to update the wiki. And the rest of us can keep checking it nervously.
Michael Gill on Moral Rationalism and Sentimentalism
Michael Gill, “Moral Rationalism vs. Moral Sentimentalism: Is Morality More Like Math or Beauty?”:http://www.blackwell-compass.com/subject/philosophy/article_view?parent=browse&sortby=date&last_results=&browse_id=957569&article_id=phco_articles_bpl052 in “Philosophy Compass”:http://www.blackwell-compass.com/subject/philosophy/.
bq. One of the most significant disputes in early modern philosophy was between the moral rationalists and the moral sentimentalists. The moral rationalists – such as Ralph Cudworth, Samuel Clarke, and John Balguy – held that morality originated in reason alone. The moral sentimentalists – such as Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, and David Hume – held that morality originated at least partly in sentiment. In addition to other arguments, the rationalists and sentimentalists developed rich analogies. The most significant analogy the rationalists developed was between morality and mathematics. The most significant analogy the sentimentalists developed was between morality and beauty. These two analogies illustrate well the main ideas, underlying insights, and accounts of moral phenomenology the two positions have to offer. An examination of the two analogies will thus serve as a useful introduction to the debate between moral rationalism and moral sentimentalism as a whole.
LeBuffe on Hobbes
Michael LeBuffe, “Hobbes’s Reply to the Fool”:http://www.blackwell-compass.com/subject/philosophy/article_view?parent=browse&sortby=date&last_results=&browse_id=957576&article_id=phco_articles_bpl053 in “Philosophy Compass”:http://www.blackwell-compass.com/subject/philosophy/.
bq. The objection Hobbes raises in the voice of the Fool against his own argument is, apparently, that it is sometimes rational to break covenant. Hobbes’s answer is puzzling, both because it seems implausible and also because it seems at odds with some of his own views. This article reviews several strategies critics have taken in trying to show that Hobbes’s answer is more plausible than it seems and one attempt to show that the Fool’s objection concerns the action of breaking covenant only indirectly.
Philosopher’s Annual
As “Keith DeRose notes”:http://fleetwood.baylor.edu/certain_doubts/?p=642, the _Philosopher’s Annual_ seems to have died. The job of the Annual was to collect the best 10 or so articles in any given year. The articles would get reprinted, but I think this wasn’t a huge part of the point. (I never remember seeing, for instance, a print version.) The main job was to recognise, in real time, the best articles that were coming out.
Now it is sad that the Annual has died, but it is the kind of thing that the philosophy blog world should be able to do something about. If the aim is to find a list of the best 10 articles in a given 12 month period, as chosen by a broad cross-section of the profession, this looks like a job that it will be easier to do in a blogging age than before.
Now TAR has been, as you’ll have noticed, not the most active blog in human history later. And that’s largely because we’re all rather busy with other projects, like teaching and grading. (At least those of us not at ANU are so engaged!) But I’m sure we could help out if Certain Doubts, or Pea Soup, or one of the other big blogs wanted to organise something to follow up on the Philosophers’ Annual.
Unsuggestor
Many of you will have seen this before, but I rather liked the “Unsuggestor”:http://www.librarything.com/unsuggester. It’s meant to be the opposite of the tool you see on Amazon and elsewhere that tells you which books are bought by people who bought a particular book. This tells you which pairs of books are _not_ jointly owned. By the Amazon logic, if you like one, you’ll hate the other.
They have a list of books that don’t go well together on the side of the page. The top one is Kant’s _Critique of Pure Reason_ and Sophie Kinsella’s _Confessions of a Shopaholic_. The third is Augustine’s _Confessions_ and Sherrilyn Kenyon’s _Night Pleasures_. Here are some other pairings.
Austin, _How to Do Things With Words_ – E. B. White, _Charlotte’s Web_
Descartes, _Meditations on First Philosophy_ – Janet Evanovich, _Two for the dough_
Ryle, _The Concept of Mind_ – David Sedaris, _Me Talk Pretty One Day_
Russell, _History of Western Philosophy_ – Emma McLaughlin, _The Nanny Diaries_
Feel free to add more in comments!