The “North American James Joyce Conference”:http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/joyce/conference/ will be here in Ithaca next week. The program runs 21 pages long, and at a rough count I think there are something like 250 papers being offered. It would be fun to attend some (I think) but the only registration option they have is $110, which is meant to cover a whole host of meals etc as well. And it’s somewhat immoral to sneak into a conference without paying registration. There is a roving reading of _Ulysses_ on Bloomsday as part of the festivities and I might pop along to see some of that. Fellow Ithacans should be aware of the English professors incoming!

The “web page”:http://www.oup.co.uk/isbn/0-19-928803-8 for Jason Stanley’s book, _Knowledge and Practical Interests_. It seems surprisingly affordable for a new academic book in hardback, though hopefully there’ll also be a paperback out before too long. I liked this part of the blurb.

bq. First book from one of the world’s leading younger philosophers.

This book should be very good.

The “web page”:http://www.oup.co.uk/isbn/0-19-928803-8 for Jason Stanley’s book, _Knowledge and Practical Interests_. It seems surprisingly affordable for a new academic book in hardback, though hopefully there’ll also be a paperback out before too long. I liked this part of the blurb.

bq. First book from one of the world’s leading younger philosophers.

This book should be very good.

A new “web-based symposium on gender, race and philosophy”:http://stellar.mit.edu/S/project/sgrp/ has just been launched. Here is their description of the site.

bq. These symposia provide opportunities for philosophers and other scholars to discuss current work on race and gender. We aim to make feminist philosophy and philosophy of race more visible to academic philosophers and others; to provide a forum for feminists and race theorists to respond rapidly to recent philosophical contributions to their fields; and to provide a forum for sustained and productive conversations between philosophers, feminists and race theorists.

More details on the project are available “here”:http://stellar.mit.edu/S/project/sgrp/courseMaterial/topics/topic1/help/text2/text.

The site has started with symposia on two papers.

* “Blackness and Blood: Interpreting African American Identity”:http://stellar.mit.edu/S/project/sgrp/materials/projects.html by Lionel McPherson and Tommie Shelby
* “Identity Trouble: Disidentification and the Problem of Difference”:http://stellar.mit.edu/S/project/sgrp/materials/resources.html by José Medina.

The symposia consist of commentaries by invited commentators with replies by the authors. There are discussion forums for those wanting to get involved. You’ll need to register to be part of these (I often wish I had registration here to cut out the spam) but the registration process seems as painless as possible.

So go check out “the site”:http://stellar.mit.edu/S/project/sgrp/. This should be a really valuable resource for people working in and around race and gender issues. I imagine the conversations on the discussion boards, and on blogs linking to “SGRP”:http://stellar.mit.edu/S/project/sgrp/, will be lively and illuminating.

“Carrie Jenkins”:http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~csj6/ points to this BBC survey to work out who people think is the “greatest philosopher of all time”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/greatest_philosopher_why.shtml.

The BBC site is taking nominations for the next 24 hours or so, with a vote to be held amongst the top 20 nominees. Right now Wittgenstein and Marx seem to be getting the most votes, with very little support for TAR’s favourites, especially Lewis and Grice. (And the reasons people give for voting for Wittgenstein seem awful. Apparently Wittgenstein showed that questions about right and wrong are meaningless … and this is a _good_ thing.) So “head over there”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/greatest_philosopher_why.shtml and add some better names/reasons to the list.

The annual “Cornell Summer Colloquium in Medieval Philosophy”:http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/scm8/cscmp.html is on later this week. There is a very interesting selection of papers, and I might try and get along to one or two of them. It’s very exciting that we have such a notable conference here at Cornell every year.

Not much blogging for the next week or so while some other matters are attended to. There are some very interesting comments threads below that I would like to jump into, especially on the preface paradox, but in practice probably won’t over the next week. Maybe when I return.

Yesterday the blog got spammed by some company offering new blogging software. Naturally, they got added to the spam block list. I think the effect of this is that anyone using their blogs will also be on the ‘do-not-accept-links-from’ list, which is a bad-making feature of a blog software supplier. Dumb spammers.

Richard at Philosophy etc posts a “call for abstracts”:http://pixnaps.blogspot.com/2005/05/cfa-metallica-philosophy.html for a volume on Metallica and Philosophy as part of Open Court Press’s Pop Culture and Philosophy series. Abstracts are due in the next month.

“David Chalmers”:http://fragments.consc.net/djc/2005/05/frank_jackson_p.html has persuaded Frank Jackson to post many papers to the “Centre for Consciousness”:http://consciousness.anu.edu.au/papers.html website. One of them is Frank’s “review of James Franklin’s _Corrupting the Youth: A History of Philosophy in Australia_”:http://consciousness.anu.edu.au/jackson/franklinreview.pdf. It starts with the following line.

bq. Philosophers are reluctant to take time off to do history, even the history of their own subject.

Now I know history of philosophy is not a big part of the mission at the Research School, but I never knew it had completely dropped off the radar screens!

I remember when this came out in print someone (and I can’t remember who) suggested the best interpretation was that he meant contemporary history, which would be relevant, given Franklin’s book, and make the claim true. So that’s the natural charitable interpretation. But as novel and unexpected sentences go, this one was fairly novel and unexpected.

I was listening to the Bloc Party album while grading an exam, and noticed one odd lyric in _Little Thoughts_.

bq. The world ain’t just made of facts.

This looks like a bald statement of an anti-Tractarian metaphysic, which is perfectly reasonable in and of itself, but somewhat out of place in a pop song. As you can see from “the rest of the lyrics”:http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial_s&q=bloc+party+lyrics+%22this+world+ain%27t+just%22+%22made+of+facts%22&btnG=Search there’s not a lot of context to get clear on exactly what they meant. (I linked to a Google page so you can choose which pop-up infested lyrics site you want to go to.)

I guess the Police did borrow an album title from Gilbert Ryle, so maybe the New Wave revival will also spark a revival of interest in British metaphysics among pop stars.