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September 24, 2004
Brian Weatherson Interview
Will Baude has interviewed our formerly very own Brian Weatherson at Crescat Sententia about his blogging at Thoughts Arguments and Rants and Crooked Timber in the 20 Questions series of blogger interviews. It was about a year ago, but I just discovered it, and it's kind of nice to see philosophers interviewed for a non-philosophy audience.
Posted by Jeremy at 7:27 PM
September 23, 2004
Updates to Early Modern Texts
I have recently been informed by Jonathan Bennett that Early Modern Texts has an additional ten undergraduate 'translations' of works by Leibniz available for our use. We first announced the launch of the site here.
Posted by MarkSteen at 2:49 PM
September 15, 2004
GMAIL accounts, anybody?
I've got five more gmail account invites that I don't know what to do with. Any takers?
Posted by MarkSteen at 12:54 AM | Comments (12)
September 11, 2004
Williamson and vagueness
Williamson's theory of vagueness has always struck me as being very odd. Roughly, he holds that we know that there is a clear cut off line between what counts as, say, bold and what counts are not bold, although we don't know which one it is. I understand the considerations that lead him to his theory. For one think he rejects supervaluationism on the grounds that it requires rejection of inference rules. He also thinks that it is incoherent to suppose that vague utterances in borderline cases both say something and fail to be either true or false. Yet his theory struck me as very counter-intuitive. Then one day as I was reading Pascal's wager (I was preparing to teach it) I realized that Pascal gives an example that makes Williamson's theory more digestible, at least for me. Pascal says that we can know that infinite numbers exist without being able to identify them. If we can know that infinite numbers exist without knowing which one they are, it's possible that we can know that there are such clear cut off between what counts as bold and what does not. Who would of thought that Pascal could influence one to accept Williamson's theory! I realize this might not interesting to the already Williamson converts but perhaps it is to the non-believers...
Posted by dgatzia at 11:57 AM | Comments (6)
September 9, 2004
Speaker Schedule for 2004-5
I thought some outsiders might be interested in the following speaker schedule (blatantly just cut-and-pasted from an email by Ishani and Ben). Thanks Ishani and Ben for all the work of organizing. All days are Fridays unless otherwise noted, and we don't have all the titles available. Frances Howard-Snyder, Western Washington University, September 10 (Ethics, Metaphysics, Religion) "Cannot" Implies "Not Ought" Richard Moran, Harvard University, October 1 (Mind, Aesthetics, Epistemology, Wittgenstein) Getting Told and Being Believed Michael Morgan, Indiana University, October 6 (Note: Oct. 6 is a Wednesday) (Religion, Jewish philosophy) (Co-sponsored with Religion and Judaic Studies) Ernest Lepore, Rutgers University, October 15 (Language, Logic, Metaphysics, Mind) Context and Content Ted Cohen, University of Chicago, November 12 (Aesthetics, Humor) (Cohen is coming as part of the University's speaker series on humor, but is giving a separate talk to the philosophy department.) Susan Campbell, Dalhousie University, February 4 (Feminism, Philosophical Psychology, Aesthetics, Ethics) Jeff McMahan, Rutgers University, April 8 (Ethics, Political Philosophy) Nathan Salmon, University of California at Santa Barbara, April 15 (Metaphysics, Language)
Posted by MarkSteen at 12:24 PM
New Hardin Paper
Via Brian's site Online Papers in Philosophy it has come to my attention that there is a new paper there by Jonathan Cohen bursting with praise for the work on color by our emeritus, C.L. Hardin. I thought some folk, Dimitira especially, might want to check it out. And thanks to Brian for keeping up the great work at OPP.
Posted by MarkSteen at 12:19 PM | Comments (2)
September 3, 2004
From Atheism to Deism?
Odd news from an odd source. Joe Carter of Evangelical Outpost has a post describing how it could be that Antony Flew is moving from atheism to naturalistic theism [or, given what the post says, perhaps moving from considering naturalistic theism completely irrational to entertainable]. If you make any comments there, be nice. Feel free to leave nasty ones here. Thanks to our own Jeremy/Parableman for the link. What should we think of this?
Posted by MarkSteen at 12:03 PM | Comments (3)
To the New Guys
For our new grad students, and two new professors, if you would like to be furnished with a login and password please email me at marksteen AT gmail DOT com. One more announcement. Tom McKay's class on plurals has changed from Tuesdays at 4:00 to Thursdays at 7:15. Also, our nice web-space benefactor, Matt Mullins of Ektopos, has added the cool Amazon feature of books by our profs, which you can find on the lower right. As we couldn't put every book down, I'll be rotating them from time to time.
Posted by MarkSteen at 11:48 AM | Comments (1)