The January 2006 edition of “SGRP”:http://stellar.mit.edu/S/project/sgrp/ (Symposia on Gender, Race and Philosophy) has been published. “SGRP”:http://stellar.mit.edu/S/project/sgrp/ features panel discussions of prominent papers on, as the title suggests, gender, race and philosophy. The papers discussed in this edition are:

* Elizabeth Anderson, “Uses of Value Judgments in Feminist Social Science: A Case Study of Research on Divorce” (Hypatia 19:1 (2004): 1-24.), with comments from Linda Alcoff, Sharyn Clough, Marianne Janack and Charles Mills
* Anita Superson, “Privilege, Immorality, and Responsibility for Attending to the “Facts about Humanity”” (Journal of Social Philosophy, v. 35, n. 1 2004, pp. 34-55), with comments from Louise Antony, Stephen Darwall, Laurence Thomas and Jennifer Uleman

This is the acknowledgments footnote from Timothy Williamson’s “Reference, Inference and the Semantics of Pejoratives”:http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/faculty/members/docs/Reference.pdf.

bq. This paper discusses some of the same phenomena as the fascinating Kaplan 2004, and reaches conclusions that are in some respects quite similar (a difference concerning the notion of validity is noted below). One sign of my general debt to David Kaplan is the difficulty that I have in writing a paper without citing Kaplan 1989, a difficulty that I share with many other philosophers of language. I first encountered his work as an undergraduate, when I read Kaplan 1969, and was immediately impressed by his intellectual fertility, his rigour and his playfulness. Opponents of the scientific spirit in philosophy often associate it with humourless severity, sterility, and indifference to nuance and aesthetic value. David is a wonderful counterexample. Playfulness is one of the best antidotes to that toxin for the scientific spirit, the desire for salvation from philosophy. Precision forces one to respect the subtle distinctions that free-flowing ‘humanistic’ prose pours indifferently over. Rigour provides the constraints that distinguish creativity from arbitrary variation. By precedent rather than precept, logic teaches the value of elegance and a sense of form, even in the search for truth.

Online Papers in Philosophy is now being edited by Jonathan Ichikawa, a Brown University student who many of you will know through his online papers and posts to various blogs. The new address is here:

bq. “http://blogs.brown.edu/other/opp/”:http://blogs.brown.edu/other/opp/

And the new RSS feed is

bq. “http://blogs.brown.edu/other/opp/atom.xml”:http://blogs.brown.edu/other/opp/atom.xml

I’m *very* grateful to Jonathan for taking this over, as it was getting much too much for me, as you probably noticed from the pitiful amount I did on it last semester. So pop on “over there”:http://blogs.brown.edu/other/opp/ and thank Jonathan for taking it on.

While you are there, you might look at a new paper by Igor Douven and Timothy Williamson “Generalizing the Lottery Paradox”:http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/faculty/members/docs/genlot2.pdf. They post a very general critique of a class of solutions to the lottery paradox. As far as I can tell, the criticism doesn’t touch the solution I put forward in “this paper”:http://brian.weatherson.org/cwdwpe.pdf, because my solution (a) has a restricted version of the conjunction principle and (b) because of the functionalism isn’t _structural_ in their sense. But a lot of my rivals do fall by the wayside…

“Brian Leiter”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2006/01/secretly_reads_.html recently linked to “the rock star philosopher store”:http://www.cafepress.com/rsphilosopher. There is a lot of good stuff there, especially the titular joke. If you don’t know the joke, you should read “Ted’s paper on maximal properties”:http://fas-philosophy.rutgers.edu/sider/papers/maximal.pdf. (And note Ted’s snazzy icon.) The observations that maximal properties are extrinsic, and that most ordinary predicates denote maximal properties, are to my mind the biggest advances in metaphysics in the last few years, so reading this paper is worthwhile even if you’re looking for more than the context of a joke.

OPP is on short hiatus, but it will be back shortly at a new and exciting location. In the meantime, two links to postings by P. M. S. Hacker.

First, the “review of Soames’s history volumes”:http://info.sjc.ox.ac.uk/scr/hacker/docs/Soames%20Philosophical%20analysis.pdf to which “Soames recently replied”:http://www-rcf.usc.edu/%7Esoames/replies/Rep_Hacker.pdf.

Second, a “wave file”:http://info.sjc.ox.ac.uk/scr/hacker/docs/original1.wav of the APA symposium on Hacker’s and Max Bennett’s book, _Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience_, with Daniel Dennett and John Searle as critics. Note that this file is 42MB, so it might take a while to download. If I had more technical skills and gumption I would download it, convert it to an MP3 file, and post that to save all the bandwidth. But I don’t.

Hat tip to John Oberdiek for that link.

Frank Jackson has been made an Officer of the Order of Australia in today’s “Australia Day Honours list”:http://www.itsanhonour.gov.au/docs/Australian_honours_2006.pdf (PDF link). Here is the citation.

bq. For service to education, particularly in the disciplines of philosophy and social sciences as an academic, administrator and researcher.

This is one of the highest official honours an Australian civilian can receive, and Frank is I believe the first philosopher for many years to be so honoured. (The awards are explained at greater length “here”:http://www.itsanhonour.gov.au/index.cfm.) It is of course highly deserved. Congratulations Frank! Or, to be more precise, congratulations Frank Cameron Jackson AO!

Thanks to Michael Smith for passing this information along.

* Clayton Littlejohn on “The Trolley Problem entry on Wikipedia”:http://claytonlittlejohn.blogspot.com/2006/01/more-trolleys-more-problems.html.
* Philosophy Talk “starts podcasting”:http://theblog.philosophytalk.org/2006/01/the_best_of_phi.html.
* “APA Pacific Schedule”:http://apa-pacific.org/current/.

“This”:http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/thisweek/2006/jan/01_17_ipod.asp is pretty cool.

bq. Don’t be so sure anymore that a “podcast” user is merely taking in the latest hit tune or yesterday’s show of Howard Stern railing about something or other. For in last week’s list of 32 “notable” podcasts featured on the web site of the Apple iTunes Music Store you can find not only hot soap operas and popular music but also the 15 lectures that comprise UCSD’s Philosophy 10 course, “Introduction to Logic.” Taught by Associate Professor of Philosophy Rick Grush and offered in the fall, winter and spring, Phil 10 draws up to 300 students each quarter.

I probably should be doing the same thing with my 101 lectures. Sadly, I’m not enough of a geek to figure out how to do this. (No really, I only play a geek on the interweb.) Anyway, congrats to Professor Grush for getting this recognition.

Via “Daily Phil”:http://philosophy2.ucsd.edu/dailyphil/.

Here at TAR we rarely highlight ancient philosophy, but every generalisation
is made to be broken.

Daniel Nolan, Stoic
Gunk,
forthcoming in Phronesis

The surviving sources on the Stoic theory of division reveal that the
Stoics, particularly Chrysippus, believed that bodies, places and times were
such that all of their parts themselves had proper parts. That is, bodies,
places and times were composed of gunk. This realisation helps solve
some long-standing puzzles about the Stoic theory of mixture and the Stoic
attitude to the present.

Here are some other papers that you might like to have a look at.

Ralph Wedgwood, Contextualism and Moral Beliefs

In this paper, I shall first outline a version of epistemological
contextualism. I shall present this version of contextualism as a contextualist
account of terms like ‘justified belief’, rather than terms like ‘knowledge’.
(If justification is a necessary condition for knowledge, this contextualist
account of ‘justified belief’ would naturally lead to a parallel
contextualist account of ‘knowledge’; but I shall not address
the question of whether justification is necessary for knowledge here.)
Unlike most contextualists, I do not claim that my version of contextualism
will help to solve any challenging sceptical paradoxes; but I shall
argue that this version of contextualism can nonetheless shed light
on some other epistemological issues, focusing especially on an issue
that arises about the justification of moral beliefs.

Ryan Wasserman and David Manley, A Gradable Approach
to Dispositions

Previous theories of the relationship
between dispositions and conditionals are unable to account for the fact that
dispositions come in degrees. We propose a fix for this problem that has the
added benefit of avoiding the classic problems of finks and masks.

—-, On Linking Dispositions
with Conditionals

We introduce a dilemma that
faces any analysis of dispositional ascriptions in terms of subjunctive
conditionals. However carefully the relevant conditionals are formulated,
the analysis will founder either on the problem of accidental closeness
or on the problem of Achilles’ heels. The dilemma arises even for
sophisticated versions of the conditional analysis that are designed to
avoid the familiar problems of finks and masks. We conclude by evaluating
the prospects for an analysis and offering a proposal of our own.

Scott
Soames, Hacker’s
Complaint forthcoming in Philosophical Quarterly

Thanks to the editors for asking me to reply to P.M.S. Hacker’s
review of my Philosophical
Analysis in the Twentieth Century. I begin with his complaint about the
materials I chose to
discuss.

“In its selection of materials it is unrepresentative: significant
figures are omitted and
pivotal works are not discussed. . . the book is less a history
of analytic philosophy than
a series of critical essays on select figures and a few of their
works, often chosen
primarily to substantiate a thesis that is erroneous.”

Since no erroneous theses leading to indefensible choices about what material
to include are
identified, I will try to tease this out as we go.

Still working through the emails I have to deal with, but in the meantime two interesting links.

Now that “Science Blogs”:http://scienceblogs.com/ has started up, I found a new (to me) philosophy blog, “Adventures in Ethics and Science”:http://scienceblogs.com/ethicsandscience/. It’s by Janet D. Stemwedel, and you can get a sense for her work by perusing her “greatest hits post”:http://scienceblogs.com/ethicsandscience/2006/01/a_quick_tour_through_the_vault.php.

Back in the centre of the known universe, the philosophy in the pub series has expanded into a “Melbourne Thinkers Week”:http://www.heartofphilosophy.com/melbournethinkersweek/index.html festival. Philosophers including Graham Priest, Steve Curry, Rob Sparrow and many others will be doing events including public lectures, philosophy cafes, corporate ethics events, book launches and a philosophy panel. Check it out if you’re in Melbourne, or if you live somewhere less fortunate, have a look to see if this kind of public philosophy event may be replicable in your postcode.