A few things to promote while we deal with the joy from seeing another Yankees season end unsuccessfully.

* Alex Doonesbury is now attending MIT, and as “Kai von Fintel points out”:http://www.semantics-online.org/2006/10/stata-in-the-comics that means the Stata Center is now immortalised in a comic strip.

* “Brian Leiter reports”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2006/10/sixmonth_morato.html that Nous and PPR are not accepting new submissions for six months. I’m rather disappointed in this news for several reasons, but I guess we’ll just have to live with it.

* “Flinders University researchers report”:http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/heres-why-you-hate-mondays/2006/10/06/1159641511693.html that if you don’t sleep in on weekends, you feel better on Mondays and Tuesdays.

* If you are in the United States, the “deadlines to register to vote”:http://www.mydd.com/story/2006/10/4/172322/483 are coming up soon. Several of us around here at TAR have no voting rights at all, but it would be a shame if TAR readers were non-voters too.

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A physicist holds forth on the boundries of science.

(Wait a minute, that’s not physics…)

Lots of stuff happening around the internets.

Crooked Timber’s Henry Farrell has created an “academic blogs wiki”:http://www.academicblogs.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page. If you think your blog should be listed, head on over there and add it. There are empty wiki pages for describing each of the blogs, so if you’d like to, say, add a description for “TAR”:http://www.academicblogs.org/wiki/index.php?title=Thoughts_Arguments_and_Rants&action=edit, you could do that too.

Richard Heck has created “a Greasemonkey script”:http://frege.brown.edu/heck/linux/programs/grease.php for altering the appearance of NDPR. If you love the NDPR content, but would like some control over how it appears, now you can have that control.

Carrie is too modest to mention it here, but some of her work has been written up in “The Australian”:http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20481788-12332,00.html. Apparently there have even been some radio appearances following this up. Why the media is more interested in flirting than in the details of epistemological analyses is a bit of a mystery to me.

The Guardian has a “very good obituary”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,1884313,00.html for Jonathan Cohen, who died last week. (Via “Brian Leiter”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2006/10/in_memoriam_l_j.html.)

Also on my list of things to read is Matthew Jones’ “The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution: Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, and the Cultivation of Virtue”:http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?z=y&EAN=9780226409559&itm=2. It is about, broadly speaking, the intersection of philosophical, scientific and mathematical interests in the work of Descartes, Pascal and Leibniz. That makes it sound like it is about the impact of the new sciences on the metaphysical and epistemological views of those philosophers. And while there is some of that, the larger theme is the influence of moral considerations on their work. So this is a work that should be very interesting to philosophers.

One or two disclaimers. I of course haven’t read the book, what with my to be read pile now visible from the moon and all. But I have talked to Matt a fair bit about it, so I’m very much looking forward to reading it. There is a long discussion of Descartes’ geometry which I’m particularly interested in, and which promises to have a lot of philosophical payoffs. Matt is professionally a historian (he’s in the history department at Columbia), but I hope this work gets a lot of philosophical attention.

The latest issue of _Mind_ has just been released, or at least it just turned up on my RSS feed. There looks to be lots of good stuff there, as if I don’t have enough to read already. Anyway, I just wanted to recommend Chris Potts’ nice review of Siobhan Chapman’s “Paul Grice: Philosopher and Linguist”:http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/results.asp?WRD=Paul+Grice+philosopher+and+linguist&z=y&cds2Pid=9481. As well as a nice review of Chapman’s book (also, coincidentally, in my pile of things to read) it does a nice job of stating Grice’s relative importance to philosophy and linguistics.

Jonathan Kvanvig has been kind enough to post mine and John Doris’ response to Jason Stanley’s book Knowledge and Practical Interests over at the epistemology blog Certain Doubts. The copy on CD is an MS Word file, and since not everyone can read Word documents, I’m also posting a copy here as a pdf [224kb]. I’ll leave the comments closed on this post so as not to detract from the conversation at Certain Doubts. Comments are very welcome over there!

This is pretty well worked over territory, but I wanted to run through some options for dealing with cases where we forget our evidence.
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