Two four-year postdocs are being advertised in the Basic Knowledge project at Arché. I can highly recommend both the project and the research environment to anyone with the relevant interests. (The closing date is 30 November.)

Daniel Nolan has written a reply to my paper ‘The Philosophy of Flirting’, called ‘The Varieties of Flirtatious Experience‘. Daniel discusses three puported sources of counterexamples to my account: “serious” behaviour, failed flirts, and accidental flirtation. There is even a methodology section.

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‘.

For a bit of fun, I wrote a note on the philosophy of flirting a while ago, which will shortly be appearing in The Philosophers’ Magazine. I’ve now posted a probably-final version. The main thesis I want to defend is that one cannot flirt without (in quite a weak sense) intending to do so. I therefore want to distinguish mere flirtatious behaviour from flirting proper. The inadvertantly flirtatious can, I think, fairly defend against accusations of flirting by denying having the intention. (But note that this does not absolve the inadvertantly flirtatious from all potential blame: mere flirtatious behaviour could be just as blameworthy as flirting in the wrong context!)

Well, I’m not really new to philosophy blogging, so I hope I’m in the ‘underappreciated’ category…

By way of introduction, let me just invite people to visit my home page and my own blog, Long Words Bother Me. To warm up here, I’m cross-posting something from LWBM.

I’m currently working on a paper on a priori knowledge, and I thought it might be helpful to start out with an overview of available positions, characterized in terms of the answers their defenders would give to a set of questions. (I’d be really interested to hear whether people think anything important is missing from my list, whether the description is helpful, etc..)

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