Soon after I left last week, I heard the news that Iris Young had died. I didn’t know her at all, so I don’t have anything to add to the heartfelt reminisces of those who did. There are hundreds of blog posts on her listed “here”:http://technorati.com/search/%22iris%20marion%20young%22. The Chicago memorial notice is “here”:http://www-news.uchicago.edu/releases/06/060802.young.shtml. “Daniel Drezner”:http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/002830.html was a colleague of hers at Chicago.

bq. It would be safe to say that Iris and I disagreed a fair amount on matters of politics and policy. It would also be safe to say that I really did not care. Iris was one of the more decent people I’ve met in the academy — indefatigable and interested in everything. Her students — and there were many of them — were devoted to her.

bq. She had been suffering from cancer for the past year or so, not that this slowed her down all that much. The way she carried herself was remarkable — not because Iris was all bulldog determination in the face of her illness and treatment, or any such maudlin sentiment. Rather, she was cheerfully unafraid to tell you exactly how she was feeling, and doing so in a way that filtered the awkwardness out of the conversation.

bq. She was both brave and gentle, and she will be missed.

Cordelia Fine has an article in the Australian about the thesis that self-control is the key to academic success. The article presents a way of thinking – supported by a study involving chocolate chip cookies and radishes – according to which self-control is like a muscle: it gets tired.

Moreover the “muscle” that you use to read tedious articles, write 500 words a day and refrain from telling your advisor/students what you think of them is the same muscle that helps you go for a run and reject chocolate chip cookies. (This, I suspect, explains the Princeton grad student phenomenon known as “Generals Belly”.)

Fine discusses two ways to maximise self-control for your work – both suggested by the muscle analogy. The first is to build up your self control – by exercising it. But fortunately her philosopher father has developed another way:

My father, a professional philosopher, has a job that involves thinking very hard about very difficult things. This, of course, is an activity that consumes mental resources at a terrific rate.

The secret of his success as an academic, I am now convinced, is to ensure that none of his precious brainpower is wasted on other, less important matters. He feels the urge to sample a delicious luxury chocolate? He pops one in his mouth. Pulling on yesterday’s shirt less trouble than finding a clean one? Over his head the stale garment goes. Rather fancies sitting in a comfy armchair instead of taking a brisk jog around the park? Comfy armchair it is. Thanks to its five-star treatment, my father’s willpower – rested and restored whenever possible – can take on the search for wisdom with the strength of 10 men.

Ah, it’s good to know that top philosophers are still at the forefront of psychological research.

Apparently Cordelia Fine works for Centre for Applied Philosophy Public Ethics here at the University of Melbourne (where I’m spending the summer). Maybe I can persuade her to come to Brunetti’s with me…

Like Carrie, I’ll be kicking around TAR from now on. If I have anything to say about the philosophy of logic and language, I’ll probably be cross-posting it to my old blog as well, but I’m hoping that TAR will be a venue for writing about other things.

Like the following question:

Is it easier to imagine being a serial killer than it is to imagine being like David Lewis?

I was at the AAP in Canberra this year, and one of the talks I went to was Steffi Lewis’ presentation of David Lewis’ correspondence. This was Steffi’s third talk on the letters and it’s striking just how prolific and reliable a correspondent David was. I’ve come away from each talk with the sense that he regularly wrote 5-6 page letters, largely filled with serious philosophical content, and replied to his correspondents within 3 days or so of hearing from them.

And I find it almost impossible to imagine being like that.

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This week’s episode of “Philosophy Talk”:http://www.philosophytalk.org/ features a panel discussion that was recorded at the Pacific APA. The panellists were Liz Harman, Sean Kelly and your humble narrator, discussing the future of philosophy. Though I can occasionally “spot short term trends”:http://tar.weatherson.org/2004/07/05/contextualism-relativism-and-the-near-term-future-of-philosophy/, I’m pretty useless at spotting larger patterns, so I wouldn’t put much stock in much of what I say.

The show will air on Tuesday at noon PST on “KALW”:http://www.kalw.org/ in San Francisco, and be repeated at 8pm PST Thursday on “Oregon Public Radio”:http://www.opb.org/. I’m going to be away at “Bellingham”:http://myweb.facstaff.wwu.edu/nmarkos/BSPC/BSPC7/BSPC7.htm the next few days, so I won’t be able to hear the show live to air, but hopefully I’ll hear it soon after. I’m not exactly sure what I said, so when I hear it I might have to scramble to come up with some justifications.

Because I’ll be away, approving comments will be slower than usual, though now that this is a group blog you won’t just have to wait for me to return for fresh posts!

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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For various reasons, I’ve decided to turn TAR into a group blog. My main hope in doing this is that my slavish imitation of “Brian Leiter”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com will be rewarded with a notch higher ranking for Cornell in the next round. But I also hope that it will lead to some rewarding interactions on the blog, as well as highlighting some bloggers whose work I feel hasn’t been sufficiently appreciated in the past, and bringing some new voices into philosophy blogging. I’ll let the various members of the group introduce themselves over the coming hours, days and weeks, so if you keep checking back in here you’ll find a few new faces appearing.

One last Ryle post for the day. This was a very odd section in Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson’s “Knowledge How”:http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/%7Ejasoncs/JPHIL.pdf (PDF).

bq. Let us turn from Ryle’s arguments against the thesis that knowledge-how is a species of knowledge-that to his positive account of knowledge-how. According to Ryle, an ascription of the form ‘x knows how to F’ merely ascribes to x the ability to F. However, it is simply false that ascriptions of knowledge-how ascribe abilities. As Ginet and others have pointed out, ascriptions of knowledge-how do not even entail ascriptions of the corresponding abilities. For example, a ski instructor may know how to perform a certain complex stunt, without being able to perform it herself. Similarly, a master pianist who loses both of her arms in a tragic car accident still knows how to play the piano. However, she has lost her ability to do so (cf. also Ziff (1984, p. 71). It follows that Ryle’s own positive account of knowledge-how is demonstrably false.

I’m not where Ryle offers that account. As I read him, Ryle says that knowledge how is, like most mental states, a complex disposition that has no (easily statable) necessary or sufficient conditions. To get a sample of the kind of thing Ryle does think is involved in knowledge how, consider what he says about knowing how to tie a knot.

bq. You exercise your knowledge of how to tie a clove-hitch not only in acts of tying clove-hitches and in correcting your mistakes, but also in imagining tying them correctly, in instructing pupils, in criticising the incorrect or clumsy movements and applauding the correct movements that they make, in inferring from a faulty result to the error which produced it, in predicting the outcomes of observed lapses, and so on indefinitely. (55)

It seems to me that Ryle could quite easily say that the pianist and the ski instructor both have the knowledge how Tim and Jason assign to them, since both of them can imagine how to perform the act, can instruct, criticise and praise pupils accordingly, can infer what’s going wrong in misperformances etc etc. So while these may be counterexamples to the equation of know how and ability, I don’t see how they are counterexamples to anything that Ryle says.

Greg Restall was recently interviewed by ABC’s Radio National about logical pluralism. I’m really not kidding – there was a radio show on logical pluralism on national radio. I’m so proud of my country, or at least its national broadcaster, sometimes. The link is “here”:http://www.abc.net.au/rn/philosopherszone/stories/2006/1689459.htm.

It’s not actually a philosophy link, but assorted ex-pats might like to know that you can listen to a lot of ABC shows as podcasts. They recently added the flagship current affairs shows, AM, PM and the World Today, which are great for keeping up with what’s happening. And they also have the Philosopher’s Zone, which Greg appeared on, as a podcast.

Did you know you can get a Firefox plugin that adds an option to search the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy to the search bar? It is available “here”:http://mycroft.mozdev.org/download.html?name=stanford+ency&sherlock=yes&opensearch=&submitform=Search.

Finally, on the recent trend of noticing what’s happening in philosophy blogs, Eric Schwitzgebel has a blog, “The Splintered Mind”:http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/ which I’ve been enjoying a lot.