The “papers blog”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Opp/Archives/002780.html is up and there’s a few things to note.

First, the links to the PhilSci Archive don’t seem to be working, but I think that’s a temporary server problem.

Second, we have the first of the APA Central papers, in this case “Robert Allen’s”:http://home.twmi.rr.com/robertallen/papers.html “comments on Noel Hendrickson’s”:http://home.twmi.rr.com/robertallen/fwe.doc paper on free will, posted. Since I won’t be at the Central, I hope there are many more such papers posted in the next week or so.

(Why won’t I be at the APA Central? Three reasons. First, I’m already going to too many conferences this semester. Second, the Cubbies do better in years I don’t go to Chicago, and I feel some sympathy for Cubs fans. Third, it would mean going to all three APA conferences in an academic year, and that seems excessive. To be sure I went to all three APA conferences in calendar year 2003, but that’s somehow different.)

Third, there are a large number of papers that aren’t new to the web but that I hadn’t noticed before. These include papers by “Gabriel Segal”:http://www.kcl.ac.uk/kis/schools/hums/philosophy/staff/g_segal.html, “Brian Skyrms”:http://hypatia.ss.uci.edu/lps/home/fac-staff/faculty/skyrms/Skyrmspapers.html and “Kai Wehmeier”:http://members.cox.net/wehmeier/.

The “journals survey”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/homepages/weatherson/journals/Journals_Survey.htm is ticking along nicely with 152 votes in so far. Keep those votes coming in! I think Brown’s email service is working again, so my delays in responding to email are now _mostly_ due to laziness/inefficiency than technical problems. But at least I should get votes. (UPDATE: I spoke too soon. Now my outgoing mail server – run by Cox not Brown – is down, so I can’t send out messages. My excuses for not replying in a timely manner to mail just keep growing!)

The “papers blog”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Opp/Archives/002775.html is up, with two philosophy of language papers!

I had to read this sentence (fragment) from the abstract for “Keith DeRose’s new contextualism paper”:http://pantheon.yale.edu/~kd47/OLB.pdf a few times to make sure I got it.

bq. I like to think this paper contains significant enough advances in the argument that it is in important respects the state of the art — that anyone who wants to be well-informed about the debate but who doesn’t read this just won’t be up on the contextualist side of the debate.

I was hoping a state of the art piece would be slightly different, and that anyone who _did_ read it _would_ be up on the contextualist side of the debate. (‘Up on’ doesn’t quite sound right there. Is it negative polarity?)

I still haven’t received all my overnight mail, so I don’t know how many people have voted in the “journals survey”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/homepages/weatherson/journals/Journals_Survey.htm. It’s at least 127. You can make it at least 128.

There don’t seem to be any updated pages today, so there might not be a “papers blog”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Opp/. On the other hand, I tinkered a little with the “daily entries”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Opp/Archives/002769.html and “monthly archives”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Opp/Archives/2004_04.html. The monthly archives use a nice calendar from “Dive Into Mark”:http://diveintomark.org/archives/2002/08/06/fullscreen_calendars_in_movable_type.

I also reduced the sidebars on the individual entries here. This halved the size of the average page, and took about 17MB off my footprint. Since this site will be privately hosted soon, I’ve had to start doing things like this to minimise page size.

On a similar topic, the Rochester blog has moved into a new Movable Type home “here”:http://cif.rochester.edu/~philgrad/.

I don’t know how many votes have been submitted in the “journals survey”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/homepages/weatherson/journals/Journals_Survey.htm, because I get the votes by email, and Brown email is down again. (Or it was down again a few hours ago and email is still banked up in the system.) Either they ran out of gaffer tape over at CIS, or the computer system got so old that even gaffer tape won’t hold it together. The people in computer services at Brown do an incredible job, but it would be much nicer if we just had a better server rather than relying on miracle workers to work miracles all the time.

Don’t let that stop you voting in the “journals survey”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/homepages/weatherson/journals/Journals_Survey.htm. The votes will come through eventually.

There’s some iPod geekiness in the extended entry which is probably of very little interest to those of you without iPod’s, so I’ve left it off the main page.
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The “papers blog”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Opp/ is posted for the day, a little late due to it being the weekend!

I didn’t include it in the papers blog because it isn’t a new paper, but Keith DeRose has posted his 1996 paper “Knowledge, Assertion and Lotteries”:http://pantheon.yale.edu/~kd47/KAL.pdf which might be interesting to many people.

We currently have 115 votes in the “journals survey”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/homepages/weatherson/journals/Journals_Survey.htm – make it 116!

The “papers blog”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Opp/ is up, with papers on _only_ and Dworkin on hard cases. It seems these links to the papers blog lead to another 100 or so hits, so maybe I should keep posting them.

The “journals survey”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/homepages/weatherson/journals/Journals_Survey.htm is ticking along nicely, with nearly 100 votes so far. That’s about as many as I expected, but a few fewer than I’d hoped for. I’m stunned/disappointed with how few votes we’ve had so far from women, as well as from philosophers over 40. Right now it’s basically a survey of what under-40 male philosophers think, which is not the _most_ interesting thing in the world. There are some interesting demographic splits within that group, as well as a slightly unexpected leader in the overall ranking, but I’d like a broader group of voters. I’d still like to get 150 to 200 votes, so if you haven’t voted early, vote anyway!

Lots more to blog about but I’ve been swamped with house-buying paperwork this week, so other obligations are pressing. Maybe more tomorrow.

I occasionally get asked by graduate students for my opinion on the relative quality of various journals. The context is usually that they are interested in finding out which journals would be good to publish in, especially if they are looking to boost their job market credentials. And sometimes the context is that they just like looking at rankings. As I do, from time to time.

So I was interested in a survey Manuel Vargas was running on the quality of various journals. And I decided, with Manuel’s help, to post a web version of it. There’s a link to the survey below.

bq. “Journals Survey”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/homepages/weatherson/journals/Journals_Survey.htm

Obviously this is meant as a bit of fun, not as a serious investigation. And obviously there’s a lot more to choosing which journals to publish in than just the journal quality. (Turnaround time is important, for instance.) But it might be interesting to get a snapshot of what people think.

I’ll post the results, and as much of the raw data as is possible without compromising the confidentiality of survey participants, in a week or so.

UPDATE (11:30): I’ve added a bunch of journals because of suggestions from around the world since the survey was started. If you’re one of the 25 who’ve voted so far, if you go back and just submit votes for the journals that have been added since you voted, it won’t count as a double vote. (I know this is a *very* unscientific practice, but the whole thing was mostly for kicks anyway.)

SECOND UPDATE (10:00am): I’ve added even more journals due to good suggestions coming in. Though from now on I’ll have to be very convinced that there’s good reason to add more, because I better stop spending time on the survey and get back to work. Again, it’s OK to go back and add in evaluations for the journals you answered N/A for the first time, provided you don’t vote for any journal more than once.

There’s been some interesting results so far, but rather than reveal the surprises, I’ll just make a demographic note. The readers of this blog, or at least the survey-taking subset of them, trend strongly young, male and not interested in history of philosophy. TAAR’s marketing department is processing this information as we speak.

This is turning into a trend. In the past few weeks we’ve seen new group blogs started by philosophy graduate students at Syracuse (“Orange Philosophy”:http://www.orangephilosophy.blogspot.com/), Rochester (“What is the Name of This Blog?”:http://urphilosophy.blogspot.com/) and now Brown (“Fake Barn Country”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Blog/).

They all look very interesting, though I’d rather that the Syracuse and Rochester blogs didn’t use Blogger. Last week I did a workshop on blogging at Wesleyan (wonderful people and place, by the way) so I was looking into the possibilities for blog programs. And I was very impressed by “Typepad”:http://typepad.com/. Obviously many readers will know how nice Typepad is, but I hadn’t realised just how user-friendly it is. I was stunned by how easy it is to customise your blog. Admittedly all typepad blogs look kinda alike unless you really get involved with the underlying HTML code, but you can at least make your blog a little distinctive without having to learn any HTML at all. And having integrated comments is obviously a huge advantage over Blogger.

To be sure Typepad is not free. But given the size of these group blogs, the cost of even the most expensive Typepad package will only be a dollar or two per month per blogger. If these blogs are meant to be long-term options, I’d think this is a very worthwhile investment.

UPDATE: To everyone coming over here from Leiter, two quick notes. First, the days are already longer here than they are down in the South. Admittedly not warmer, but at least longer. Second, if you’re a regular reader of philosophy journals, please take the “survey on journal quality”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/homepages/weatherson/journals/Journals_Survey.htm.

We noted last night that some philosophers look like action heros. Well it turns out that with a bit of Photoshopping magic, _all_ philosophers can look like action heros.

bq. “Philosophical Powers”:http://www.geocities.com/krinklyman2/powers.html

Thanks to Raul Saucedo for the (very amusing) link.

I’m sure all the Cool Kids have heard this already, but I only just found out about “Skeewiff’s”:http://skeewiff.com/main.html remix of the Soggy Bottom Boys’ “Man of Constant Sorrow”:http://skeewiff.free.fr/Skeewiffwhereartthou.mp3. That’s a 7.3MB download, but it’s well worth it. It is, at the very least, the best freely available song I’ve heard in a long time. And electronic remixes of bluegrass songs seems like such an obvious idea, I’m surprised it hasn’t been done before. (Or, perhaps more to the point, I’m surprised it hasn’t been brought to _my_ attention before.)

I’m sure all the Cool Kids have heard this already, but I only just found out about “Skeewiff’s”:http://skeewiff.com/main.html remix of the Soggy Bottom Boys’ “Man of Constant Sorrow”:http://skeewiff.free.fr/Skeewiffwhereartthou.mp3. That’s a 7.3MB download, but it’s well worth it. It is, at the very least, the best freely available song I’ve heard in a long time. And electronic remixes of bluegrass songs seems like such an obvious idea, I’m surprised it hasn’t been done before. (Or, perhaps more to the point, I’m surprised it hasn’t been brought to _my_ attention before.)