Ted Sider will be doing a discussion club talk this Friday at 4.30 in Goldwin Smith Hall. The paper is _Reducing Modality_, which sadly isn’t available on “his web page”:http://fas-philosophy.rutgers.edu/~sider/.

Daniel Nolan’s book on “David Lewis”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1844650030/junius-21 has been released in the UK, though not the US. The link is to Amazon UK, which sadly I don’t have an associates account for. But you can buy the book there, and it will ship soon. The Amazon page already includes a review of the _index_, which is a whole new level of detail.

There’s a new paper on “Philosophers’ Imprint”:http://www.philosophersimprint.org/. It is Mark Schroeder’s “Realism and Reduction: the Quest for Robustness”:http://www.philosophersimprint.org/005001/.

I’m sure everyone here is reading Dave Chalmers’s blog, but if not, he has “three”:http://fragments.consc.net/djc/2005/01/soames_on_twodi.html “interesting”:http://fragments.consc.net/djc/2005/02/soames_chapter_.html “posts”:http://fragments.consc.net/djc/2005/02/soames_chapter__1.html on Scott Soames’s anti-2D book.

UPDATE: The link to Daniel’s book now goes via Chris Bertram’s charity link. Thanks Chris!

SECOND UPDATE: Daniel’s book had risen as high as 1309 in Amazon sales rankings, but has now fallen back to 1659. I was going to say advertising on TAR works, but it looks like it is a fairly short-term gain.

Because of “Andy’s examples”:http://www.geocities.com/eganamit/NoCDT.pdf a lot of people have been thinking again about the _Death in Damascus_ case in Gibbard and Harper’s causal decision theory paper. The story is famously an old story, but there has been some uncertainty about how old. Now Jordan Howard Sobel has written up “notes on its origin”:http://www.scar.utoronto.ca/~sobel/PuzzlesDEATHSPEAKS.pdf. (Warning – PDF in both links.)

Everyone else is doing it, so why can’t I? Here’s the January numbers.

15336 Unique Visitors
49386 Visits
110140 Pages viewed
135972 Hits

To give you some pause as to how seriously to take those numbers, in January I started putting on major protections against referral and comment spam, mostly sending 403 (i.e. page forbidden) errors to spammers. In January I had 23,572 attempts to access the page that resulted in 403 errors. Those aren’t included in the above stats, but in that time there were plenty of spam attempts that got through. And of course if I hadn’t put any defences in they would all have gotten through. So be careful how seriously you take page viewership numbers on high profile sites, because a large percentage of the ‘readership’ may be automated spammers.

Over at Fragments, “David Chalmers asks for suggestions for the list of the most important recent-ish books in philosophy of mind”:http://fragments.consc.net/djc/2005/01/books_in_the_ph.html. He seems to like books from long ago, thinking nothing post-1970 matches up with the best 1920-1970 work, and nothing post-1987 matches with the best 1970-1987 work. Is he right?

If I had more time (and a pony) it’d be fun to run a poll to figure out now that we’ve got some critical distance the most highly regarded books in several fields in philosophy. (What about metaphysics, for example? Language? I guess political philosophy is relatively easy, but overall it’s tricksy.) But as it is we’ll have to settle for discussion threads.

PS: No discussion of best philosophy of mind books _here_. All that talk should happen over at “Dave’s place”:http://fragments.consc.net/djc/2005/01/books_in_the_ph.html.

Over at Fragments, “David Chalmers asks for suggestions for the list of the most important recent-ish books in philosophy of mind”:http://fragments.consc.net/djc/2005/01/books_in_the_ph.html. He seems to like books from long ago, thinking nothing post-1970 matches up with the best 1920-1970 work, and nothing post-1987 matches with the best 1970-1987 work. Is he right?

If I had more time (and a pony) it’d be fun to run a poll to figure out now that we’ve got some critical distance the most highly regarded books in several fields in philosophy. (What about metaphysics, for example? Language? I guess political philosophy is relatively easy, but overall it’s tricksy.) But as it is we’ll have to settle for discussion threads.

PS: No discussion of best philosophy of mind books _here_. All that talk should happen over at “Dave’s place”:http://fragments.consc.net/djc/2005/01/books_in_the_ph.html.

One of the effects of academia, especially philosophy, having moved so quickly to establish a presence online is that philosophers can have strikingly high Google rankings. Since a high Google ranking is to the 21st century what an ancient title was to the 20th century, this is worth some note. Obviously most philosophers, except those with particularly common names, are the first Google hit if you search their full name. The issue is how high up you are if you search just one of their names. For instance,

* “Benj”:http://people.cornell.edu/pages/beh24/ is both the first Benj and the first “Hellie”:http://people.cornell.edu/pages/beh24/, which is quite a feat
* “Ishani”:http://philosophy.syr.edu/maitra.html is the second Ishani, and the third “Maitra”:http://philosophy.syr.edu/maitra.html
* “Delia”:http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/research/graff/ is the sixth Delia and the fourth “Graff”:http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/research/graff/

On the slightly less impressive front (though we can work on improvements!) we have

* “Tamar”:http://people.cornell.edu/pages/tsg3/ is the thirty-third Tamar, but the second “Gendler”:http://people.cornell.edu/pages/tsg3/
* I am the one hundred and eleventh “Brian”:http://brian.weatherson.org but the first “Weatherson”:http://brian.weatherson.org

This is mostly to be filed under weekend frivolity, but while I’m here I should note the “papers blog”:http://opp.weatherson.org has been updated.

One of the effects of academia, especially philosophy, having moved so quickly to establish a presence online is that philosophers can have strikingly high Google rankings. Since a high Google ranking is to the 21st century what an ancient title was to the 20th century, this is worth some note. Obviously most philosophers, except those with particularly common names, are the first Google hit if you search their full name. The issue is how high up you are if you search just one of their names. For instance,

* “Benj”:http://people.cornell.edu/pages/beh24/ is both the first Benj and the first “Hellie”:http://people.cornell.edu/pages/beh24/, which is quite a feat
* “Ishani”:http://philosophy.syr.edu/maitra.html is the second Ishani, and the third “Maitra”:http://philosophy.syr.edu/maitra.html
* “Delia”:http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/research/graff/ is the sixth Delia and the fourth “Graff”:http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/research/graff/

On the slightly less impressive front (though we can work on improvements!) we have

* “Tamar”:http://people.cornell.edu/pages/tsg3/ is the thirty-third Tamar, but the second “Gendler”:http://people.cornell.edu/pages/tsg3/
* I am the one hundred and eleventh “Brian”:http://brian.weatherson.org but the first “Weatherson”:http://brian.weatherson.org

This is mostly to be filed under weekend frivolity, but while I’m here I should note the “papers blog”:http://opp.weatherson.org has been updated.

The “APA Pacific program”:http://www.apa.udel.edu/apa/publications/proceedings/v78n3/public/default.asp is now officially online.

Over at Crooked Timber, Kieran Healy has put together “a study of the Gourmet Report voting data”:http://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/003156.html. The striking results are that philosophers agree very strongly on which departments are strongest, and that there is a large difference between how much strength in different areas of philosophy correlates with overall ranking. (From my unbiased perspective in central New York, I think the discipline is shamefully neglecting the importance of ancient and medieval philosophy, but that could just be me.) Lots of stuff to read and highly recommended.

The inaugaural “Aesthetics Anarchy”:http://www.indiana.edu/~aesthete/ conference now has a webpage. I notice that I’m still listed as an invited speaker despite being somewhat short of material. The show they’re putting together there looks lots of fun, and it should be my first trip to the great state of Indiana.