I’m very happy to announce that the Sage School at Cornell has hired three new faculty. They are:

* “Derk Pereboom”:http://www.uvm.edu/~phildept/?Page=pereboom.html
* “Michelle Kosch”:http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mkosch/home.html, and
* “Nicholas Silins”:http://philosophy.fas.nyu.edu/object/nicholassilins

Michelle and Nico will be starting in Fall this year, while Derk will be starting in Fall 07.

We’re obviously very happy with the new hires!

I’ve already mentioned Nico’s hiring, so let me say something about Michelle and Derk.

Michelle specialises in post-Kantian philosophy, and you can get a very good idea of her interests from looking at her “forthcoming book”:http://www.us.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Philosophy/History/Modern/?view=usa&ci=9780199289110 on Freedom and Reason in Kant, Schelling, and Kierkegaard. I obviously don’t have any standing to say how good her scholarship is, though I trust the optinion of the many who speak very highly of her work. I will say that I’ve never heard anyone talk on early 19th Century philosophy who has done as good a job at making clear what those philosophers’ philosophical interests were, and how this relates to contemporary philosophical concern.

Derk’s role in the department will be to make it the case that I’m not the most general of the generalists. Well, that and cover philosophy of mind, free will and action theory, philosophy of religion, early modern philosophy, and whatever other interests take his fancy. There aren’t many philosophers around who are (justly) held in as high esteem as Derk is across such a wide range of fields, and at (relatively) small departments like Cornell, such generalists are worth their weight in gold. Derk was also a great colleague to have while I was at ANU last year, so I’m looking forward to getting back together with him at Cornell.

Obviously it’s been a tough couple of years for Cornell with a few very talented colleagues (and close friends) departing for greener (or at least other) pastures. But adding people like Derk, Michelle and Nico adds a lot back to the department.

I’ve been meaning for a while to write something encouraging philosophers to write entries for “Wikipedia”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page. I was hoping to have part of this encouragement be a link to a page I’d added or substantially improved, but sadly that hasn’t happened, so this is an all talk no action post. But sometimes it is good for people to do as I say, not as I do, and this is one of those times!

I’d particularly like to encourage philosophers who have written encyclopedic articles, and have copyright over what they wrote, to consider uploading a version to Wikipedia. It is a great way to spread philosophical knowledge to the wider world.

The best encyclopedia article I wrote was the Stanford piece on “intrinsic properties”:http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intrinsic-extrinsic/, and it would probably be a good idea to do something similar for the “Wikipedia page”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrinsic_and_extrinsic_properties_%28philosophy%29, which right now consists mostly of the introduction to my Stanford piece. Maybe when I get a little more spare time…

I’m sure most of you knew this already, but I was under the impression that Stalnaker’s _Inquiry_ was out of print for a while, and it was hard to get a hold of it. Anyway, it is now back in print, and available through “Barnes and Noble”:http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?z=y&isbn=0262691132&itm=1. Grab ’em while they’re hot. (Unless this is old news and I’m only just finding out about it, in which case they aren’t actually that hot, but you should still get ’em.)

UPDATE: Since I posted this, Barnes and Noble have gone out of stock. So here’s the link to “Amazon”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262691132/sr=8-1/qid=1146712530/ref=sr_1_1/104-7254347-2007142?%5Fencoding=UTF8.

Europa Malynicz pointed out to me that the BBC currently has a discussion of famous thought experiments in ethics, including Judith Jarvis Thomson’s violinist case, and a few variants on runaway trolley cars. As of this writing, over 12000 people had sent in their votes on the moral status of actions in the examples, and it is interesting to see what this (self-selected, non-random) sample of the folk think. I’ve got some comments on the results below the fold, but I’d rather everyone here went and voted before seeing the votes, so I’ve put them below the fold.
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For all your philosophical announcements.

While in the announcing mode, the first “online philosophy conference”:http://experimentalphilosophy.typepad.com/online_philosophy_confere/ has started, and there are already a few comment threads going.

I’m doing my talk on dogmatism at a couple of places next month, so I made up a slides version of it. It is rather condensed in places, but just in case anyone prefers reading a Powerpoint version to a paper version, here it is.

bq. “In Defence of a Dogmatist (slides)”:http://brian.weatherson.org/dogppt.ppt

Via “Greg Restall”:http://consequently.org/, I see that “Lloyd Humberstone”:http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/phil/department/humberstone/ has posted his 1259 page manuscript “The Connectives”:http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/phil/department/humberstone/connectives.pdf. We worked through some parts of this in seminars when I was in grad school, and it was incredibly useful and informative in all sorts of ways. I’m certain I would never have been able to write the paper on ‘truer’ without what I learned in those classes for instance, although much of what I learned from them didn’t get explicitly presented in the final paper. Highly recommended.

The latest edition of “Philosophical Studies”:http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/klu/phil/2006/00000129/00000001 contains papers from the 2004 Bellingham conference. I remember many of those papers as being very good, but I haven’t gone back and read the finished versions. Any reports on the papers would be much appreciated!

For any and all philosophy related announcements.

The comments thread below on intro courses has been really interesting, one of the best threads I’ve seen on this site. To make my position a little more concrete, I thought I’d put below the fold my plan for the 101 course at Cornell next year.
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I was talking to Andy Egan the other day about strategies for teaching intro philosophy classes. When putting together a syllabus for an intro class, there seem to be two broad strategies one can follow.

First, one can do a broad but shallow survey of a lot of different topics in philosophy. As far as I can tell, this kind of approach seems like the dominant one that people use, at least where classes with titles like “Introduction to Philosophy” are taught.

Alternatively, one can pick a small number of topics, and focus on them in some depth, hoping that this illustrates what goes on in philosophy.

I’ve been drifting towards more of the alternative strategy, so next year my intro class will largely be on philosophy of religion and philosophy of mind. (Though we’re reading the Meditations for the mind section, so there will be some serious epistemology in there to.) So I’m interested in thinking about the pros and cons of each strategy.

The benefits of the survey approach seem to be:

# Students get an idea of the different kinds of subjects they can study in philosophy.
# Students don’t get bored if they don’t like a particular topic
# There is more chance to really focus on the best accessible philosophical work, you don’t have to try and work everything into a coherent package
# Relatedly, you get to at least tell them about many of the best and most interesting ideas of the last few hundred (or thousand) years
# The title isn’t misleading; if you want to do an intro philosophy of mind course, you should call it that, not ‘Introduction to Philosophy’.

The benefits of the alternative approach are:

# You get to work through things in greater detail
# Students might actually learn something about mind, or philosophy of religion, or whatever, rather than just learning that these topics exist
# It’s only when working through things in detail that the distinctively philosophical aspects to the methodology come through

Well, I’m sure there are more benefits than this, but those were the immediately apparent ones. What approaches do people here who teach big intro classes take to the subject? Should I be going back to the ‘broad but shallow’ approach that seems reasonably successful?