Jonathan Ichikawa has “a paper up on truth in fiction”:http://blogs.brown.edu/other/philosophy/2005/11/truth_in_fiction_paper.html defending strong authorial authority.

Wo has posted “his dissertation on Lewis”:http://www.umsu.de/wo/archive/2005/11/10/Thesis, which looks incredibly interesting, but is in German. Wo wants to defend an even stronger thesis about the independence of various Lewisian theories. He thinks most of the stuff about language and laws is independent in principle from the modal realism and the theories of objective naturalness. I tend to agree about the modal realism, but I’m a little sceptical about the language. We’ve been having this debate in the comments of the Lewis blog, and Wo’s position is stronger than I’d appreciated; I may have to reconsider this.

Finally, I set up a bloglines account to track a bunch of philosophy blogs. If you want to follow the same blogs I do without having to go to the trouble of setting up or maintaining an account, you can just use this site.

bq. “http://www.bloglines.com/public/brianweatherson/”:http://www.bloglines.com/public/brianweatherson/

David Chalmers announces some post-docs at ANU. Note that the info in his post goes well beyond the JFP ad, and the positions he is advertising are really very attractive.

Wo has an interesting looking blindsight experiment, but for me, like him, it doesn’t deliver any interesting results. The experiment works in all browsers other than IE, so if you’ve got a real browser go and take the test, otherwise get yourself a real browser then do so!

I’ve updated my web pages with a new CSS-enhanced look. I have no idea how it will look in browsers other than Firefox, so this is a bit of a risk. If you have any comments, or notice any bugs, please let me know in the comments here.

bq. “My Home Page”:http://brian.weatherson.org

I’ll be particularly interested to know how the Java script on the “papers page”:http://brian.weatherson.org/papers.html, works, because it’s the first time I’ve tried anything like that.

A while ago I posted about a summer school being run at Central European University on Descrying the World in Physics. More details about the course, including application forms, are now available.

bq. “Descrying the World in Physics”:http://www.ceu.hu/sun/SUN_2006/Downloads/Recruitment/Descrying.pdf (PDF)

Mark Lieberman asks the following question.

bq. If someone like Scalia were to want a reading list for philosophy of language since Plato, what should be on it? Works by Strawson’s heroes and shades would not be at the top of my list of suggestions, but I’m not the one to compose such a list in any case. Send me your nominations, or (better) blog about it and send me the link, and I’ll summarize the results in a week or so.

See “here”:http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002603.html for the context in which Mark asks the question. I’ll possibly make some suggestions in a bit, but while things are busy here I’ll leave it to you. (Thanks to Liz Camp for the suggestion to blog this.)

Here’s a new (or at least new to me) schema for solving the Mary problem. For reasons that will become clear below, it isn’t yet a solution. But someone who knows more about consciousness will be able to convert it into a full solution. The following ideas grew out of some discussions after Derk Pereboom’s talk here last Thursday, and he (and the discussants at the talk) probably deserve the credit for what value there is in it.

We start with some facts about defeaters.
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Following “Estzer’s suggestion”:http://crookedtimber.org/2005/10/26/map-of-ct-readers/ I have created a Frappr map for TAR readers.

bq. “Where are the TAR readers”:http://www.frappr.com/thoughtsargumentsandrants

Click on that link and (a) you’ll have a chance to see where some of the readers are and (b) add yourself. At first I imagine it will be a fairly slim map, but I would like to see where the readers are. Note that although the map doesn’t show all of the US at first, you can scroll around fairly easily to see everyone.

I was thinking of writing up some kind of reply to “Scott Soames’s reply”:http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~soames/replies/Rep_Weatherson.doc to my reply to his book. But the threat of an infinite regress was looming, and I thought it would be more fun to ruminate on his title: “What we Know Now That We Didn’t Know Then”. Because there are some fun puzzles about philosophical knowledge that the end of Soames’s book brings up.
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This is basically a request for help directed to people who know more set/class theory than I do. The issue is what we should say about Lewis’s theory of properties given his own comments in “Tensing the Copula” and Andy Egan’s comments in “Second-Order Predication and the Metaphysics of Properties”:http://www.sitemaker.umich.edu/egana/files/twoop.ajp.pdf.
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