Tim Schroeder, “Desire”:http://compass.bw.semcs.net/subject/philosophy/article_view?parent=browse&sortby=date&last_results=&browse_id=635179&article_id=phco_articles_bpl047 in “Philosophy Compass”:http://compass.bw.semcs.net/subject/philosophy/.

bq. Desires move us to action, give us urges, incline us to joy at their satisfaction, and incline us to sorrow at their frustration. Naturalistic work on desire has focused on distinguishing which of these phenomena are part of the nature of desire, and which are merely normal consequences of desiring. Three main answers have been proposed. The first holds that the central necessary fact about desires is that they lead to action. The second makes pleasure the essence of desire. And the third holds that the central necessary fact about desires is that they open us to reward-based learning.

” Race, Colorblindness, and Continental Philosophy”:http://www.blackwell-compass.com/subject/philosophy/article_view?parent=browse&sortby=date&last_results=&browse_id=543249&article_id=phco_articles_bpl040

bq. The “colorblind” society is often offered as a worthy ideal for individual interaction as well as public policy. The ethos of liberal democracy would seem indeed to demand that we comport ourselves in a manner completely indifferent to race (and class, and gender, and so on). But is this ideal of colorblindness capable of fulfillment? And whether it is or not, is it truly a worthy political goal? In order to address these questions, one must first explore the nature of “race” itself. Is it ultimately real, or merely an illusion? What kind of reality, if any, does it have, and what are the practical (moral and political) consequences of its ontological status? This paper will explore the issue of colorblindness, focusing particularly on recent developments dealing with this topic in Continental philosophy. Beginning with the question of racial ontology, I will argue that race has a social reality that makes the practice of colorblindness, at least for the time being, politically untenable, and it may remain suspect even as a long-term goal.

” Well-Being: Psychological Research for Philosophers”:http://compass.bw.semcs.net/subject/philosophy/article_view?parent=browse&sortby=date&last_results=&browse_id=543235&article_id=phco_articles_bpl038

bq. Well-being in the broadest sense is what we have when we are living lives that are not necessarily morally good, but good for us. In philosophy, well-being has been an important topic of inquiry for millennia. In psychology, well-being as a topic has been gathering steam very recently and this research is now at a stage that warrants the attention of philosophers. The most popular theories of well-being in the two fields are similar enough to suggest the possibility of interdisciplinary collaboration. In this essay I provide an overview of three of the main questions that arise from psychologists’ work on well-being, and highlight areas that invite philosophical input. Those questions center on the nature, measurement, and moral significance of well-being. I also argue that the life-satisfaction theory is particularly well suited to meet the various demands on a theory of well-being.

“The Philosophy of Religion: A Programmatic Overview”:http://compass.bw.semcs.net/subject/philosophy/article_view?parent=browse&sortby=date&last_results=&browse_id=543242&article_id=phco_articles_bpl039

bq. It is argued that philosophy of religion should focus not only on the epistemic justifiability of holding religious beliefs but also on the moral justifiability of commitment to their truth in practical reasoning. If the truth of classical theism may turn out to be evidentially ambiguous, then pressure is placed on the moral evidentialist assumption that one is morally justified in taking a theistic truth-claim to be true only if one’s total evidence sufficiently supports its truth. After investigating some contemporary attempts to retain evidentialism in the face of ambiguity, a modest fideism is proposed which may serve both to ground an important ‘political turn’ in contemporary philosophy of religion and to prompt re-examination of dominant assumptions about the content of core theistic beliefs.

“Realism and Anti-Realism in Kant’s Second Critique”:http://compass.bw.semcs.net/subject/philosophy/article_view?parent=browse&sortby=date&last_results=&browse_id=426574&article_id=phco_articles_bpl031 by Patrick Kain.

bq. This article surveys recent work on Kant’s _Critique of Practical Reason_, with a particular focus on his doctrine of the fact of reason and his doctrine of the practical postulates, assessing the implications of such work for the debate about realism and antirealism in Kant’s moral philosophy. Section 1 briefly surveys some salient considerations raised by Kant’s first _Critique_ and _Groundwork_. In section 2, I survey recent work on the Kant’s doctrine of the fact of reason and argue that it does not support an anti-realist interpretation of Kant’s ethics. In section 3, I argue that recent work on Kant’s doctrine of the practical postulates does not support an anti-realist interpretation of Kant’s ethics.

Michael A. Bishop, Fast and Frugal Heuristics

bq. A heuristic is a rule of thumb. In psychology, heuristics are relatively simple rules for making judgments. A fast heuristic is easy to use and allows one to make judgments quickly. A frugal heuristic relies on a small fraction of the available evidence in making judgments. Typically, fast and frugal heuristics (FFHs) have, or are claimed to have, a further property: They are very reliable, yielding judgments that are about as accurate in the long run as ideal non-fast, non-frugal rules. This paper introduces some well-known examples of FFHs, raises some objections to the FFH program, and looks at the implications of those parts of the FFH program about which we can have some reasonable degree of confidence.

So for much of the last year I’ve been working with Blackwell on a new e-journal called “Philosophy Compass”:http://www.philosophycompass.com/home_philosophy_compass. This is one of a stable of e-journals that Blackwell is publishing across the humanities and the social sciences. The aim of each journal is to publish survey articles about the state of the art in various fields. (Mind used to do this back when I was a grad student, and I was sad that they didn’t continue them.)

The articles are pitched at a moderately high level. They are survey articles, so they aren’t meant to include cutting edge research, though of course it is hard to stop philosophers writing new arguments into review pieces! But the major aim is to introduce people with some background (e.g. talented undergraduates, or interested grad students, or faculty who haven’t been following a field) to what is happening in that area. So if you want to know what has been happening on, say, “truthmaker theory”:http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1747-9991.2006.00018.x, you can go read “Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra’s article”:http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1747-9991.2006.00018.x, and you’ll both have a good idea what is happening, and know where to look for more details.

Obviously this will have some overlap with the wonderful “Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy”:http://plato.stanford.edu/, but we think it has a different enough focus to be worthwhile. We aren’t aiming to be as comprehensive as the SEP; we’re just focussing on what is happening now. This doesn’t mean we’re ignoring history of philosophy – indeed we have a lively history of philosophy section – but even there the focus is contemporary historical research. So I hope and think that there is space for both the SEP and Compass.

For now Compass is only commissioning articles, not issuing open calls for papers. And we’ve been somewhat more successful in commissioning papers in some areas than others – indeed some sections haven’t yet got started – though hopefully that will change within the next few months. But we’re always interested in suggestions for what we should be covering. If you have suggestions, leave comments here. We have about 80 articles under commission right now, so there’s some change we’ll be covering the topic you suggest in the near future. But the more suggestions the better!

Compass is a subscription journal, so sadly not everyone will be able to get immediate access to it. Blackwell does have a fairly flexible pricing policy, so if your library doesn’t yet subscribe, it might be quite affordable for them. Obviously I’d like to see as many subscriptions as possible.

From now on I’ll be posting links, such as the post below, to new articles as they appear. There are already a number of articles there, so you should go browse around and leave complaints, compliments or anything between in the comments here.

Isidora Stojanovic, “What is Said, Linguistic Meaning, and Directly Referential Expressions”:http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1747-9991.2006.00029.x

bq. Philosophers of language generally distinguish among the lexical or linguistic meaning of the sentence uttered, what is said by an utterance of the sentence, and speaker’s meaning, or what is conveyed by the speaker to her audience. In most views, what is said is the semantic or truth-conditional content of the utterance, and is irreducible either to the linguistic meaning or to the speaker’s meaning. I will show that those views account badly for people’s intuitions on what is said. I will also argue that no distinguished level of what is said is required, and that the notion of linguistic meaning is best placed to play the role of what is said. This relies on two (possibly controversial) points. First, our intuitions on what is said cannot be detached from the ways in which we talk about what is said, and from the semantics of speech reports and indirect discourse in general. Second, beside what is said, there is an equally important notion of what what-is-said is said about, or that about which the speaker is talking. Here are, then, the three ingredients needed for the theory of what is said: linguistic meaning, what is talked about, and the semantics of reported speech.