Blog Title: Neurath's Boat

I'd heard about this before

But this is the first link I encountered which prominently mentioned that Neda Soltani, recently murdered in Iran, was a philosophy student. I suppose it's shallow that this makes me so much more interested in the story, just as perhaps...

Good things

Usually slither is more philosophically sophisticated, but here we see boy on a stick thinking like one of us.

Sample sizes

Whenever it's relevant (when feminism comes up, or materialism) I talk to my students about the studies of sex differences in the brain. The press always reports any difference discovered by researchers as proof of innate differences in cognition. Of...

Strangeness

Hubert Schwyzer, who taught me a great deal about Kant, also occasionally talked about his days as a graduate student at Berkeley in the 60s. Among his other stories, he reported that a great change in fashion happened at that...

The reason this blog has been so quiet

I'm afraid I've just been too awesome to post. (Kaufman 2009)

Greatest Philosopher of the 20th Century

Leiter's been running a poll, and Brian Weatherson has some commentary. He voted for Lewis, and I voted for Carnap, but his post is about why Russell has been doing so well. I'm actually a little surprised that Lewis is...

Qualia and Intrinsicality

Jaegwon Kim once told me that he thought secondary qualities were intrinsic if anything is. Since that time, he seems to have shifted from being a reluctant defender of reductionist functionalism to a reluctant adherent of something like Chalmers' view...

It's just one book, but...

Given the continuing poor state of philosophy when it comes to feminist issues, it seems necessary to watch out for this sort of thing. I just picked up The Cambridge Companion to Carnap, and happened to glance through the bibliography....

Empiricism and A Priori Ethics

One way of characterizing the difference between traditional empiricism and traditional rationalism is that traditional rationalists have been dazzled by the impressive certainty of our a priori knowledge. Logic and mathematics are so remarkable that many rationalists have literally accorded...

An unexpected result

So, a large majority of my ethics students at Rhode Island College said they thought there was nothing wrong with prostitution if it's voluntary. Admittedly, I elicited this result in a potentially suspect way; when nobody said anything about why...

Evaluating scientific evidence

Thanks to overcoming bias, I was led to this amusing study. A friend of mine went skydiving just a week ago; I wonder how she'll react to my informing her of the state of research into the health benefits of...

I am also trained in mereology

If you can't afford a celebrity mereologist like L. A. Paul. Thanks to Leiter Reports for finding this instance of a political blogger recognizing the need for philosophical expertise.

Epistemology and ethics

I went to a friend's dissertation defense today. Jerry Steinhofer, the friend in question, seeks to account for the value of knowledge by proposing that the distinctive feature of knowledge is that it involves true belief which is deserved, and...

Phenomena, Properties, and Documents

I've decided to give this google docs thing a try, and so I put up one of my current works in progress, related to what I was posting about a few weeks ago. It can be found here, for anyone...

Real Experimental Philosophy

Most people don't know about the lab work we have to do in our profession. Fortunately, I've never been zapped by a malfunctioning enknowledgetron; sadly, despite what you read in the comics, in real life such a thing is usually...

What is it like to be a bat?

So Scribefire seems to be misbehaving; perhaps some incompatibility with Firefox 3 or something. As a result, this initially appeared as a blank post. Still, it was a short one; easy to reconstruct. I just linked to this post from...

Experimental philosophy

Apparently there's some monstrous new survey up. I am suspicious of web surveys as a methodology, because of the obvious dangers of bias in the sample, but of course methodological perfection is generally unobtainable, and research which falls short can...

A circle

I've recently been re-reading Langton's Kantian Humility, and pondering a problem connected with her discussion. It seems to me that properties must be identified by what they do. After all, we can come to know about them, and how could...

A strange controversy

I follow some of the discussion of the DDT ban myth, often carried out on Deltoid.[1] The controversy is interesting for the lack of apparent motive for those who spread the myth. Nobody makes or stands to make huge profits...

Barnes on continental philosophy

Leiter bashes Jonathan Barnes for his dismissive attitude toward continental philosophy, alluding to "two hundred years of philosophy since Kant on the European continent." Barnes almost certainly goes too far, but Leiter's response seems to me to be equally ill-informed....

Why zombies are inconceivable (short version)

Consciousness does work. My being consciously aware of various things motivates me to react in various ways, to do things in response. The zombie scenario claims that consciousness has been removed, and everything else left the same, with "everything else"...

Trying to do better

Feminist Philosophers provide a link to an essay on "how to mentor someone who doesn't look like you." I did find it slightly surprising that Professor Wong reported encountering so few philosophers of East Asian heritage, since my dissertation supervisor...

More phenomenal content!

My previous post generated no counter-examples, just a claim that I had changed the subject. It is possible that I was insufficiently clear, so I'll start by stressing something I may not have stressed sufficiently. The point of the depth...

A phenomenal theory!

So, I've been thinking a lot about qualia, and trying to get a paper together on why they shouldn't be seen as such a problem for materialism. It seems to be generally accepted that features of mental life which can...

Hope for Clinton's campaign

If there turns out to be a set of all sets after all, she may win the nomination, or so says Fafnir. Admittedly, not in so many words (I'm referring to his third scenario, of course).

I probably read too many blogs

And don't post about nearly enough of the things that I find. I follow slacktivist, and enjoy reading his discussion of the Left Behind books, which he's blogging so nobody else ever has to read them (a noble sacrifice on...

All you zombies

Richard Chappell has been recently engaged in a defense of Chalmer's zombie argument; it has been ongoing, but an early summary of his position is here. One issue has come to worry me. Chappell keeps emphasizing that he's talking about...

Meta-reasons and subjectivism

J. L. Mackie's classic work on ethics begins by saying "there are no objective values... The statement of this thesis is likely to provoke one of three very different reactions. Some will think it not merely false but pernicious; they...

Nozick's experience machine

I have long wondered just how much Nozick's case shows, and really whether it's very convincing at all (sure, most people say they wouldn't plug in, but look at how many hours they spend playing World of Warcraft, and that's...

Did Nietzsche know he was a genius?

Clearly he believed he was a genius. And while this is perhaps slightly more controversial, it also seems to me to have been obviously true. But of course we all know from Plato that true belief is not enough for...