OrangePhilosophy

Philosophy Humor

Even though I check this blog more than once a day for spam comments, since I'm already checking my own blog, there seems to be a significant contingent of spammers who want to target it anyway due to there being no recent posts, and they must think no one will delete their comments. So to try to remedy that somewhat, in the hopes that it saves me some time deleting, I'll post a link to some really funny philosophy humor combining pretty much every standard philosophical thought experiment and counterexample into one. It appears to have been written by a former Syracuse student, so it's appropriate for OrangePhilosophy to promote it (not that a link from here gives all that much influence or traffic anymore). [hat tip: Kenny Pearce]

Undue Attention

The blog that serves as a supplement to John Perry, Michael Bratman, and John Martin Fischer’s Introduction to Philosophy links to OrangePhilosophy as an example of a department-based grad student philosophy blog. Unfortunately, the grad students in question haven't been contributing enough to keep the blog active. If I could find enough interest, I'd be happy to resume regular posting to this blog, but the current grad students don't seem to be very interested in blogging at the moment, and I'm not going to maintain an active philosophy blog here while I've already got my own personal blog.

There are several department-based philosophy blogs that are still active, and anyone coming here from the above link can turn to those as examples of what this link was supposed to serve. Those include Show Me the Argument (University of Missouri) and Go Grue (Michigan), which are very active. Ungrounded Dispositions (Buffalo) has become somewhat active in the last month or so. Less active blogs include This is Not the Name of This Blog (Rochester), What Is It Like to Be a Blog? (UConn), Unideal Observers (Bowling Green), Desert Landscapes (University of Arizona), Undetached Rabbit Parts (Western Michigan), The Web of Belief (Tufts), and the UCSB Philosophy Blog. The Florida Student Philosophy Blog is hosted by the University of North Florida, but they have contributors from other schools in Florida, and Prior Knowledge has contributors from New Zealand. Inactive (but potentially in the market for resuming as far as I know) is Fake Barn Country (Brown). Currently there is none, so I can't link to it.

David Chalmers maintains a list of philosophy blogs. It's not always up-to-date. Some of the links there now are dead, and there may be some excellent new blogs not on his radar yet (or that he hasn't had the chance to add). But it's worth checking back every now and then to see if he has anything new.

Philosophers' Carnival XL

I think it's good for this blog not to get too stagnant in case we ever bring it out of dormancy, so I like to post something every once in a while. It does make a difference with Google rankings, and spammers target sites that are inactive. I thought the Philosophers' Carnival's turning 40 was a good occasion to put a link up. So here's the 40th Philosophers' Carnival, courtesy of The Brooks Blog. Unfortunately, due to the time of year, it's not as full as it sometimes can be. But then that just makes it easier to read all the posts.

Changeable Natural Kinds

I've encountered an issue that I know very little about and was interested if anyone who might occasionally check this blog had an answer. Are there any views out there according to which there are natural kinds but something that is a member of a natural kind might cease to be a member of that natural kind and then be a member of a different one? I'm pretty sure Aristotle would never allow something like this, but I was wondering if any philosophers have defended such a view.

Update: I'm closing comments due to spam. If you wish to leave me a comment, go to the Parableman posting of this.

Racial Essentialism

I don't know if anyone is still checking anything here, but I thought I'd try to draw attention to a post on my own blog in case anyone is. I'm trying to work out a taxonomy of the various views someone might hold regarding the nature of racial groups. One of the views, sometimes called racial realism, takes races to be natural kinds something like species in biology. I'm not trying to evaluate this view at this point, just to categorize what view there might be. It seems to me that there's a great variety of possible views even within racial realism, and I'm working out some of what that variety is.

One concern that keeps arising is the use of the term 'racial essentialism', which I think is supposed to be some sort of racial realism, but most who use it don't make it clear what they mean or why they call it a kind of essentialism. I'm trying to work out the various things someone might mean when calling a view racial essentialism, and I'm looking for help in sorting through the views I've come up with and identifying any possibilities I might have missed. The post is here for any who are interested.

Since this blog is basically defunct until some Syracuse grad students want to revive it (in which case I'll happily be involved and continue to maintain the blog), I'm keeping the comments and trackbacks closed. The comments and trackbacks on the post I'm referring you to at my blog are open.

Rochester Blog Back Up

It looks like, after a long hiatus, due in particular to comment spam, that the Rochester blog is back up and running. Give 'em a looksee. (I know, I'm not supposed to be blogging here anymore, but this empty page is depressing. Post some stuff, people! Or shut 'er down.)

Deceitful Grading

I have two students whose take-home exams seem to follow the same lines of argument in a few questions. They use different sentence structure but use largely the same vocabulary and make mostly the same points in the same order. They didn't answer all the same questions, and sometimes one said a lot more than the other, but it really looks as if they were working together on some of the questions and deliberately trying to avoid looking as if they did. So here's my question. I had the thought to grade a couple of their similar answers with drastically different grades. If indeed they cheated, and I rob one of them of a whole bunch of points, the student probably deserves a lot worse. But it's not fair. I should do it to both. That's the downside of my plan. The upside is that it would almost assuredly motivate them to come to me to complain, and then I could point out how remarkably similar their exams were with both exams right in front of them. I'm not asking for advice here. I'm not going to do this. What I'm interested in is the ethical question. Would it be wrong to do something like this?

2006 Syracuse Graduate Conference

CALL FOR PAPERS:

March 3-4, 2006
Keynote speaker: Professor Mark Heller (Syracuse University)
Submission Deadline: January 5th, 2006

We invite papers of high quality in any area of philosophy. Please send your submission to Deke Gould at degouldATTsyrDOTTedu as an email attachment in PDF, Microsoft Word or Rich Text formats.

Please submit:
1. A paper no longer than 4,500 words
2. A cover page containing (a) author’s name (b) paper title (c) author’s contact information. (NB: If sending in PDF format, please include (a), (b), & (c) information in a separate document.)
3. An abstract of 200 words or less.

Please submit in blind review format, with all identifying information on the cover sheet; your paper should contain no self-references or other information that indicates your identity. No more than one paper will be reviewed per author. Please do not submit multiple papers.

Submission deadline: January 5th, 2006

For more information, contact Matthew Skene at mskeneATTsyrDOTTedu. A website with more information will be available here.

An Empirical Question?

Dave Bzdak and I just had a conversation with Don Arentz, one of our colleagues in teaching at Le Moyne College, about what seems to be an empirical question but seems difficult to see how it might be empirical. How big is your vocabulary? It would seem that the question is indeed an empirical matter. Yet how would you go about empirically investigating it? Dave suggested maybe it would be in principle possible but only if you kept track of every single word you ever encountered to get a list of all the words that might be in your vocabulary, and then you investigated to see if they were still in your vocabulary at a given time. Could you do this, though? I'm not worrying about the possibility of coming up with a list of all the words you've ever encountered. Suppose you could do it. That's in principle possible, I would say, even if in practice it would be amazingly difficult to implement. Given that list, could you determine which of those words are in your vocabulary at any given time? It seems that, if you could, then you would know how big your vocabulary at the time was.

So suppose I want to know how many of those words are in my vocabulary right now. I could presumably go down the list to investigate which ones I know, right? I'm not sure it's so easy, though. I could recognize some words that I know. But wouldn't there be others that I know and don't recall the meaning of just by seeing the word in isolated form? There are some whose meaning I would remember if I saw it in the right sort of sentence that would trigger my memory. Of course, there would be others that I don't know but would get from context, in which case I've just added a word to my vocabulary. I shouldn't count those. I wanted to know how many were in it before I started the investigation. What if I'm not in a position to distinguish between the cases when the sentence triggers my memory of what a word means and cases when the context helps me add a new word to my vocabulary? It's not clear to me that I could tell the difference. If that's right, then the exact count of my vocabulary isn't really empirically discoverable after all. That's really weird. Does that mean the size of my vocabulary is not really an empirical question?

"Before"

Before a seminar a few of us got into an argument. The argument was over the following sentence and what it entails. "Albert grew a beard before Carla." Supposing that Carla never grows a beard, is this sentence true? Some said 'yes', others said 'no'. Those who said 'no' did so, I think, because they think that this sentence entails that Carla grew a beard. I don't want to go through the argument step by step; instead, I suggest that we take it to the comments thread. Feel free to comment with just a 'yes' or a 'no' if you don't want to give (or don't have) an argument to defend that answer.

Informed Consent and the Ick Factor

Wired News has a fascinating article on face transplants. It contains an interesting statement. Some doctors have suggested that the novelty of the surgery and the lack of certainty on what risks even are make informed consent impossible. I commented on Jonathan Ichikawa's post about this, pointing this out, wondering what they might have meant by that, and his response struck me as equally unusual. He thinks this is an attempt to make a philosophical argument out of an ick factor. Is that really what's going on? What does this statement about informed consent amount to? I have some thoughts, but I really wanted to see what people think about this without my suggesting anything.

Update: Comments are close. If you'd like to comment, do so on this post.

Dr. Steen

Congratulations to Mark Steen, who successfully defended his dissertation this afternoon. He's still got to do a few minor revisions on the bulk of it and one major reworking of one aspect of his last chapter, but he's as good as done at this point. For some reason I have this urge to write a review of the defense, but I'll save Mark having to relive the event.

John Roberts: Wrong Line of Work?

A New York Times piece on Judge John Roberts makes this interesting statement:

"The English teacher used to talk about his papers after he had written them because they were outrageous but very well crafted," remembered John Langley, an emergency room doctor in New Orleans who was a class below Judge Roberts at La Lumiere. "He could take an argument that was borderline absurd and argue for it so well that you were almost at the point of having to accept his stance even though it was intuitively obvious that it was absurd."

Perhaps he should have been an analytic metaphysician.

Philosophers' Carnival XVI

Philosophers' Carnival XVI is at Dinner Table Donts. Mark's open post on Hume and Chesterton is probably an appetizer, while Ben Bradley's PEA Soup post Against Satisficing Consequentialism is, of course, the soup.

Thurvan the Liche Lord Returns

Our Gnu has another post combining fantasy role-playing with philosophy. I can't figure out which philosophical issue this one is supposed to illustrate, though. Maybe I'm missing some crucial piece of information.

In case you missed it, here's the first one about time travel and fate, and see our discussion of it here.