The 2006 Social for Exact Philosophy conference is in San Diego next May, and it has a nice website here. I won’t be going because I’ll be happily grading 101 exams at the time, but it should be fun. Just one question: wouldn’t it be utility maximising to have San Diego-located conferences in winter?

After a rather long journey, with delays caused by the wonderful Sydney luggage handling system leading to our spending the last 2 nights on planes, Ishani and I are back in Syracuse. I have about 20 emails to respond to from while I was out of email contact, so if I owe you an email, hopefully I’ll write it tomorrow, after returning to normal body clock routine.

TAR will be on hiatus for a week or so while I’m travelling. One amusing story to leave you with while I’m away.
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Arché is launching a new project in epistemology, and they have put out a call for expressions of interest from prospective Research and Visiting fellows, PhD students and Network members. Many more details below the fold, and even more at their site.

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Jonathan Ichikawa has “a paper up on truth in fiction”:http://blogs.brown.edu/other/philosophy/2005/11/truth_in_fiction_paper.html defending strong authorial authority.

Wo has posted “his dissertation on Lewis”:http://www.umsu.de/wo/archive/2005/11/10/Thesis, which looks incredibly interesting, but is in German. Wo wants to defend an even stronger thesis about the independence of various Lewisian theories. He thinks most of the stuff about language and laws is independent in principle from the modal realism and the theories of objective naturalness. I tend to agree about the modal realism, but I’m a little sceptical about the language. We’ve been having this debate in the comments of the Lewis blog, and Wo’s position is stronger than I’d appreciated; I may have to reconsider this.

Finally, I set up a bloglines account to track a bunch of philosophy blogs. If you want to follow the same blogs I do without having to go to the trouble of setting up or maintaining an account, you can just use this site.

bq. “http://www.bloglines.com/public/brianweatherson/”:http://www.bloglines.com/public/brianweatherson/

David Chalmers announces some post-docs at ANU. Note that the info in his post goes well beyond the JFP ad, and the positions he is advertising are really very attractive.

Wo has an interesting looking blindsight experiment, but for me, like him, it doesn’t deliver any interesting results. The experiment works in all browsers other than IE, so if you’ve got a real browser go and take the test, otherwise get yourself a real browser then do so!

I’ve updated my web pages with a new CSS-enhanced look. I have no idea how it will look in browsers other than Firefox, so this is a bit of a risk. If you have any comments, or notice any bugs, please let me know in the comments here.

bq. “My Home Page”:http://brian.weatherson.org

I’ll be particularly interested to know how the Java script on the “papers page”:http://brian.weatherson.org/papers.html, works, because it’s the first time I’ve tried anything like that.

A while ago I posted about a summer school being run at Central European University on Descrying the World in Physics. More details about the course, including application forms, are now available.

bq. “Descrying the World in Physics”:http://www.ceu.hu/sun/SUN_2006/Downloads/Recruitment/Descrying.pdf (PDF)

Mark Lieberman asks the following question.

bq. If someone like Scalia were to want a reading list for philosophy of language since Plato, what should be on it? Works by Strawson’s heroes and shades would not be at the top of my list of suggestions, but I’m not the one to compose such a list in any case. Send me your nominations, or (better) blog about it and send me the link, and I’ll summarize the results in a week or so.

See “here”:http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002603.html for the context in which Mark asks the question. I’ll possibly make some suggestions in a bit, but while things are busy here I’ll leave it to you. (Thanks to Liz Camp for the suggestion to blog this.)