I imagine most readers have seen Edward Adelson’s checkershadow illusion, because it’s done the rounds of a few blogs. If you haven’t seen it it’s worth looking at, because it’s really quite remarkable.
Posts by author:
Brian
If one just read the blogosphere, one might get the impression that few conservatives thought the UN or its senior officials ever did anything useful, and that some rather unbalanced souls on the right approve of murdering UN representatives. In the interests of being fair and balanced, I thought I’d point out that some conservatives don’t agree.
When I first saw this line on the new Bush campaign website, I thought it must be another parody.
bq. Ruth supports President Bush because… of his work for job creation and economic growth.
You know, if my job creation record looked like this, I think I would be trying to pretend I’d had other priorities the last 30 months or so.
I was a little puzzled by something Kos said in discussing the latest polling from New Hampshire. The poll has Dean at 28% and Kerry at 21%, among a sample of 600 voters. The poll officially has a margin of error of 4%, so Kos was unwilling to call it a clear lead for Dean. This policy strikes me as rather conservative.
“Philosophy Talk”, a new public radio show hosted by two esteemed Stanford philosophers, John Perry and Ken Taylor, pilots tomorrow on KALW. The show is at 1pm Pacific Time (that’s 4pm in New York, 9pm in London and 6am in Melbourne, if I’ve done my sums correctly) and if the technology is working should be available in live streaming. The show tomorrow is on lying, with Tamar Shapiro (also from Stanford philosophy) and Paul Ekman, the world’s foremost authority on emotions and facial expressions, among the guests. It should be fun, and it should certainly be better than what passes for ‘talk’ radio in this country. If you want more info about the show, this puff piece from the Stanford Reporter gives John Perry a lot of space to set out what he wants to do with the show.
Here’s an odd little fact about philosophy and linguistics, my two areas of ‘expertise’.
In linguistics, or at least in semantics which is what I mostly read, it is quite common to see PhD dissertations cited in research articles. This is true even when the dissertations have been turned into books. (Which they often are, and which are often widely cited.) To take one prominent example, I think the canonical work on negative polarity items is still William Ladusaw’s 1980 PhD dissertation, which is cited in just about every paper on negative polarity.
In philosophy this kind of thing is very rare, at least in the areas in which I work. I can’t remember the last time I saw a dissertation cited that wasn’t written by one of the authors of the citing paper. (Perhaps there were some were the dissertation was by a student of the citer, but I can’t even remember one of those.) And this isn’t because dissertations are published so the books that come out of them are cited. In the areas I work in, many if not most people do not publish their dissertation as a book, and those that do are often much less widely cited than the journal articles by the same authors. (There’s one prominent recent exception.)
Does anyone know who was John Rawls’s PhD dissertation advisor? This question came up in discussion around here (a propos of nothing much at all) and no one knew, but I imagine at least one reader, if not a fellow Timberite, will know.
The Sydney Morning Herald recently ran a long profile on the Hungarian-Australian philosopher George Molnar. Australian philosophers can be a weird lot sometimes, but Molnar stands out quite a bit even by our standards. I met him a few times at conferences after he returned to philosophy, but I never knew how many things he’d done outside philosophy. Somehow I don’t think a life in the academy with some blogging on the side will lead to quite the same kind of newspaper reports about me any time down the track.
The discussion threads on naturalism have been lots of fun, but I’m going to have to leave them behind to head off to my favourite little philosophical conference. Unless the thread lasts another week (an eternity in blogtime!) it will be done before I return. So I thought I’d close with a point of agreement.
I’m very glad Jacob Levy is back posting on the Conspiracy.
bq. I’ve heard that there are institutions on the east coast where as many as a _hundred_ students sit in a big room and watch the professor, or not, as their fancy takes them, as if they were watching television. If true, _this_ is the real scandal!
Heh. I actually quite enjoy teaching those big lecture classes. Sometimes getting to perform on a stage is fun, even if my material isn’t exactly Shakespeare. But that doesn’t mean it’s good for the students.
I hope Jacob will be pleased to know that Brown is moving to be more like Chicago, with a stronger emphasis on seminar style teaching, especially at freshman level. I think we think tv style lectures are scandalous too.
I’d like to say that LanguageHat has a grouse post about Aussie slang for you bludgers to go have a perv at next smoko, but sadly a few of those words are neither in my idiolect nor the Officially Approved Idiolect of Crooked Timber.
A long and winding post responding to some issues about morality and naturalism.
Via Scott Martens, I saw that the Chronicle of Higher Education has published an article on the differences between philosophy in Britain and North America.
Larry Solum has a typically insightful post responding to Matt Evans’s criticism of Richard Dawkins for proposing a naturalistic ethics. I think Larry’s criticisms are spot on, but for my money much too tentative.
Over at Crescat Sententia, Will Baude has been defending subjectivism about morality. Will doesn’t defend the traditional positivist view that "Murder is wrong" means (roughly) "Boo for murder!", but rather that it means "I disapprove of murder". Freespace’s Timothy Sandefur responds to Will with several moral and legal arguments. This seems to me to be a mistake. Will’s making a metaphysical and semantic claim, and the right responses will be based on metaphysics or semantics. Fortunately, there are plenty of the latter kind of argument.