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?

Hopefully the databases driving the blog are getting stable.

Here’s the weekly message board for announcements about conferences, events, papers or anything noteworthy and philosophical. Thanks to everyone who has used it so far!

Last weekend I was at the very successful workshop on conditionals organised by the graduate students at the University of Connecticut. The aim of the workshop was to bring together philosophers and linguists with very different methodologies together. I think the interaction was useful. Kai von Fintel told the philosophers that from a semantic point of view, the problem is that philosophers don’t read enough David Lewis. Or, perhaps more precisely, they don’t read the right David Lewis, especially “Adverbs of Quantification”.

I did a version of “Conditionals and Relativism”:http://brian.weatherson.org/car06.pdf, and got some valuable feedback from it. (Note though that the version I did isn’t a lot like that version. I’ll hopefully write something here soon about the differences.)

There are more comments about the conference by “Kai”:http://semantics-online.org/blog/2006/04/how_ordinary_are_conditionals and at the new “UConn gradblog”:http://www.whatisitliketobeablog.com/?p=9.

Congrats again to the organisers (Franklin Scott and Brian Leahy) for a very successful workshop.

The Sage School of Philosophy and the _Philosophical Review_ are pleased to announce a Workshop organized around J. Robert G. Williams’s ‘Eligibility and Inscrutability’, the winner of the 2006 Young Philosopher’s Essay Competition prize. This year the competition was in philosophy of language – fifty-five submissions were reviewed. The final version of the paper will be published in the _Philosophical Review_. Everyone interested is welcome to attend.

Location: Lincoln Hall, Room B-21, Saturday, April 22, 10:00 am – 1:30 pm

Program

9:45 Slow gathering (coffee, bagels, etc. available)
10:00 Robert Williams (University of Leeds): Synopsis of ‘Eligibility and Inscrutability’
10:20 Timothy Bays (Notre Dame University): Comments
11:00 Short break
11:05 John Hawthorne (Rutgers University): Comments
11:45 Long break (coffee, bagels, etc. once again)
12:00 Robert Williams (Leeds University): Responses
12:20 General discussion
1:30 Slow dispersing

Abstract of ‘Eligibility and Inscrutability’

Inscrutability arguments threaten to reduce interpretationist metasemantic theories to absurdity. Can we find some way to block the arguments? A highly influential proposal in this regard is David Lewis’ ‘eligibility’ response: some theories are better than others, not because the fit the data better, but because they are framed in terms of more natural properties. The purposes of this paper are (1) to outline the nature of the eligibility proposal, making the case that it is not ad hoc, but instead flows naturally from three independently motivated elements; and (2) to show that severe limitations afflict the proposal. In conclusion, I pick out the element of the eligibility response that is responsible for the limitations: future work in this area should therefore concentrate on amending this aspect of the overall theory.

There have been a few oddities with the blog database over the last couple of days. So a couple of posts, and several comments, have been lost. Sorry if this has happened to your comments. I don’t exactly know what the problem is, but I hope it’s fixed shortly.

I have a few thanks to make to various hosts for their hospitality over the last little while, but I might wait until I know the posts will survive to make them…

Over the weekend, as many of you will have noticed, we had some problems with the website. Now my email is not working particularly well. If you sent me something urgent in the last 5 days, it might be worth resending it to bw93-at-cornell-edu. I hope this account at least is working.

Sorry for the inconvenience. Regular service will return shortly etc.

We seem to have lost some data from while I was away over the weekend. Sorry about this – I don’t know quite what happened. Anyway, use this for any announcements, including announcements that were on the threads that somehow got deleted.

I still haven’t crawled out from under the mountain of work that I abandoned before and during the APA, so blogging will be slow for a while. But happily, part of the work is something bloggable. That includes the latest Lewis notes I wrote. These are on the first half of “Reduction of Mind”, and include an extended discussion of a point that was at the centre of Eric Hiddleston’s interesting paper from last week’s APA. (Sadly Eric’s paper isn’t online or I’d link to it.)

The notes are “on the Lewis blog”:http://lewisblog.weatherson.org/archives/004721.html and “in PDF”:http://brian.weatherson.org/LewisCourse/h9.pdf.