Via David Chalmers most of the papers for the APA Pacific are now available online. Quite a lot there to work through! In principle it should mean I can make a more informed decision about what papers to go to in SF. In practice, that’s not so clear.

UPDATE: I should do a list of papers that seem particularly interesting to me out of this. But for now I just want to point out a paper of interest to those who follow the perenially fascinating discussions about how to make life after death compatible with materialism, Jeffrey Green’s “A Critique of the Jumping Animals Account of Resurrection”:http://www.philosophy.ubc.ca/apa/current/papers/066.pdf

SECOND UPDATE: I thought it might be useful to have a copy of the papers page where the abstracts were listed alongside the titles. So I’ve created such a page “here”:http://brian.weatherson.org/apa.html. There weren’t abstracts for all the papers on the APA website, but I’ve copied across the ones that were there. I’ll put all this on the papers blog on the weekend.

The deadline is fast approaching for _Philosophical Review’s_ Young Philosophers Essay Competition. Here’s the blurb.

bq. The Sage School of Philosophy and the Philosophical Review are pleased to announce a Young Philosophers Essay Competition in philosophy of language. Full-length articles on any topic in philosophy of language, broadly construed, will be considered. Submissions must be in English. The competition is open to anyone currently enrolled in a Ph.D. program (or equivalent) in philosophy or a related subject, as well as to anyone who did not receive a Ph.D. or equivalent degree before January 1, 2000. Submissions will be judged by members of the Sage School of Philosophy. Provided the number and standard of submissions are sufficiently high, a winner will be chosen to present their article at a symposium to be held at Cornell University. Two specialists in the field will be invited to comment on the winner’s article at the symposium. The winning article will be published as the Young Philosophers Essay Competition winner in the Philosophical Review . The deadline for submission is March 1, 2005.

So if you’re a young philosopher with a philosophy of language paper sitting in your top drawer, polish it off and send it here!

“Kit Fine”:http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/fine/ will be speaking at Cornell on Friday March 4, at 4.30pm in the Goldwin Smith Building. The topic is “Relatively Unrestricted Quantification”. Hopefully many people from the area will be able to come along.

The week after that “Stephen Yablo”:http://www.mit.edu/~yablo/home.html will be in town, so it’s busy philosophy time here in Ithaca.

“Kit Fine”:http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/fine/ will be speaking at Cornell on Friday March 4, at 4.30pm in the Goldwin Smith Building. The topic is “Relatively Unrestricted Quantification”. Hopefully many people from the area will be able to come along.

The week after that “Stephen Yablo”:http://www.mit.edu/~yablo/home.html will be in town, so it’s busy philosophy time here in Ithaca.

Simon Keller went to Davidson to do “a philosophy talk”:http://www.davidson.edu/academic/philosophy/events.html and ended up on local TV talking about his paper.

“Here’s a link to the story and video.”:http://www.news14charlotte.com/content/special_edition/in_depth/?AC=&ArID=86360&SecID=125

Well done Simon!

I was just reading “Bill Lycan’s _Mind_ review of Jonathan Bennett’s Guide to Conditionals”:http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/oup/mind/2005/00000114/00000453/art00116. I’m meant to be reviewing that book as well, and now I have to face the fact that not only is my review late, there is no way it will be as good as an existing review of the book.

I thought Lycan’s analysis of the three paradigms guiding work on conditionals was a really positive insight. So I probably learned more from reading Lycan’s short review than I learn from most long articles. Strongly recommended.

But this post isn’t here to make a substantive philosophical point, but rather note a bizarre anomoly. On the ingenta page for Lycan’s review, the keywords for his article are listed as

bq. *antitumor vaccination; gene therapy; melanoma; phase I/II trial; renal cell carcinoma*

I’m sure there’s a connection between renal cell carcinoma and conditionals, but the article doesn’t exactly make it explicit.

The papers blog this semester has been even more haphazard than I intended. The plan was that we’d cut back to thrice-weekly updates, on Tuesday, Thursday and the weekend. (I teach at 9am on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so I can’t do morning updates then, and the system isn’t ideally set up for evening updates, and it’s not worth doing two weekend posts.) Add in my absences at conferences etc, and my occasional inability to get a post done (as in this weekend) and it’s a bit of a mess. Hopefully from now on we’ll settle back into _mostly_ doing the 3 a week routine. Sorry for all the mess-ups before this.

The best thing that could happen for me professionally is if a bunch of smart philosophers make arguments for interesting philosophical conclusions that use dubious sporting analogies which can be exposed by those who spend large chunks of time watching the sports in question. I don’t really expect that this will become a commonplace in philosophy, but I’m glad to say I found one instance in Michael Glanzberg’s “Against Truth Value Gaps”:http://philosophy.ucdavis.edu/glanzberg/againstgaps.pdf.
Continue reading →

Benj Hellie’s paper “Noise and Perceptual Indiscriminability”:http://people.cornell.edu/pages/beh24/npi.pdf has been accepted (I think conditional on some small things) for publication in _Mind_. Well done Benj! Since I, like a few other prominent philosophers, am 0-for-some-large-n at _Mind_, I’m a little jealous. Here’s the abstract of the successful paper.

bq. Perception represents colors inexactly. This inexactness results from noise, and results in apparent violations of the transitivity of perceptual discriminability. Whether these violations are genuine depends on what is meant by “transitivity of perceptual discriminability”.

While talking about Cornell’s successes at _Mind_ I should mention that Mike Fara’s “paper on counterpart theory”:http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/research/fara/counterparts.pdf (co-written with Tim Williamson) was the lead article for the year in the January 2005 edition. So well done Mike also!

I’m dreadful at keeping my blogroll up to date. I don’t really use blogrolls, so I don’t pay that much attention to mine. What I do pay attention to are sidebars with links to fun things happening on the web. I first saw the idea on “caoine”:http://caoine.org/, and I’ve finally got around to shamelessly copying it. I might from time to time borrow some of the links from there as well. Such as, for example, my new favourite blog of all time – “1000 bars”:http://thousandbars.blogspot.com/. It’s the story of a man trying to drink in 1000 different bars in 2005. The whole thing reminds me of a time when (at least in fiction) there was nothing at all unusual about a character stopping for a quick drink at 10:30 and adding thoughts about the bar to his interior monologue. Highly recommended.