I’ve been reading Christopher Peacocke’s “The Realm of Reason”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0199270724/caoineorg-20?creative=125581&camp=2321&link_code=as1, and I was rather struck by one of the moves in it. Unless I’ve really badly misinterpreted what he says in Chapter 3, he thinks you can come to justifiably believe in, and perhaps even know the truth of, theories of natural selection by looking really hard at a kitchen table and reflecting on what you’re doing.
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Brian
As “Brian Leiter”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/archives/bleiter/001463.html reported, it’s a wonderful day for philosophy in Australia. David Chalmers, Paul Griffiths and Philip Pettit have been awarded Federation Fellowships, which are among the biggest and most prestigious awards in Australian academia. The awards are for five years, and having the three of them around (even more than they are now) should be great for Australian philosophy.
As “Kieran noted yesterday”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002007.html I’ve been gallavanting around the world (most recently into St Andrews) so I haven’t had time to promote the latest round of philosophy blogs. Actually there have been two big group blogs launched since the Arizona blog Kieran linked to. I was going to try and make a systematic list, but that’s hard work away from one’s home computer, so I’ll just link to David Chalmers’s very good “list of philosophy blogs”:http://jamaica.u.arizona.edu/~chalmers/weblogs.html instead.
Unlike CT, most of these blogs are geographically based. The contributors to group blogs are usually from the same time zone, and frequently from the same zip code. I prefer CT’s cosmopolitan flavour, but that isn’t looking like becoming the dominant form of blogging. That’s a pity, because the real attraction of the medium, to me anyway, is that it helps overcome the tyrannies of distance. Hopefully active comment boards and crosslinks can do that even if the blogs themselves are spatially centralised.
The CNN Report on “The Day After Tomorrow”:http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/science/05/27/weather.movie/index.html has, as its quoted scientific expert, “John Christy”:http://www.nsstc.uah.edu/atmos/christy.html. The same John Christy who has contributed to such balanced pieces of work as “Global Warming and Other Eco-Myths”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0761536604/qid%3D1037900631/sr%3D11-1/ref%3Dsr%5F11%5F1/103-6040331-3800643. Yep, that’s our liberal media.
“John complains”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001872.html that the version of the two-envelope paradox I give is not theologically accurate. I was trying to come up with a more theologically accurate one, but I couldn’t really. Still, the following is intended to be a little closer to theological reality.
Brian Leiter has a “nice response”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/archives/bleiter/001241.html#001241 to an article in the _Village Voice_ on “the job market in the humanities”:http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0417/kamenetz.php. I mostly agree with Brian’s points, though I have one or two nits to pick.
I just watched one of the craziest at bats I’ve ever seen in a baseball game. Alex Cora, one of the weakest hitters in baseball, was facing Matt Clement, a pretty good pitcher. After the count ran to 2-1, Cora fouled off 14 consecutive pitches. After the first 7 the commentators were talking about how absurd it was to see all these consecutive foul balls. By 14 they didn’t even have any cliches left. The really surprising thing was that almost all the fouls were close to the lines – hardly any of them went into the stands.
Then on the 18th pitch of the at bat, Alex Cora, in one of the toughest parks to homer in in baseball, hit one into the bullpens beyond right field. Long at bats are fun to watch, but they often end anti-climactically. But Alex Cora hitting a home run, that was a nice ending. I do feel bad for the Cubs fans, because they seem cursed this game, but I’m pretty pleased I got to see something like that.
While all the epistemologists were “safely tucked away in Moscow”:http://www.class.uidaho.edu/inpc/7th-2004/, Massachusetts tried to slip some unreasonable provisions into its draft death penalty statutes.
bq. One of the major recommendations is raising the bar for a death penalty sentence from the normal legal standard of guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt” to a finding of “no doubt about the defendant’s guilt.” (“New York Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/03/national/03DEAT.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1083769665-5fdOsijTKGYxWSfW2htAmw)
I haven’t watched _South Park_ in years, but when I did I tended to agree with the conclusion of “this article”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/28/arts/television/28SOUT.html?ex=1398484800&en=9cf4a2bb20610253&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND that it’s too preachy for its own good. Still, the article’s title gives me an idea or two. _South Park and Philosophy_ could be better than most of the “_Randomly Chosen Segment of Pop Culture and Philosophy_”:http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/04/20/1082395861338.html?from=storyrhs books that are coming out I think. Perhaps there is still potential for life in the genre. Apart from _South Park_, what could be next?
One hears it said from time to time that it’s irrational to perform inductive inferences based on a single data point. Now this is sometimes irrational. For example, from the fact that Al Gore got the most votes in the last Presidential Election it would be foolish to infer that he’ll get the most votes in the next Presidential Election. But it isn’t always irrational. And this matters to some philosophical debates, and perhaps to some practical debates too.
“CNN reports”:http://www.cnn.com/2004/SHOWBIZ/Music/04/21/music.worst.songs.ap/index.html that _We Built This City_ by Starship has been voted worst song of all time in what looks like a slightly less scientific poll than we could get by sampling the readership of a random blog. The list of the 50 worst looks like it is designed to bring back bad music memories. Other offenders honored include Paul McCartney (twice), Vanilla Ice, Billy Ray Cyrus and Toby Keith. (TK is on the list only because it was produced by the anti-American liberal media.)
We all had a bit of a giggle at the foolish anti-war sloganeers who insinuated that the Iraq invasion was done simply to try and get lower oil prices. So it’s a bit of a shock to find out that one of the things the White House bargained for before the war was “lower oil prices”:http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000103&sid=aDtL66T_rvqY&refer=us in the run-up to the election.
The issues involved here seem to be simply scandalous. A foreign, and for all intents and purposes hostile, government is informed of our war plans before the Secretary of State is. And when that government agrees to help, the help is delivered in the form of partisan assistance in the electoral cycle, rather than say military support that might lead to fewer of our troops being killed. So you’d expect the liberal media to be jumping all over the story. And with the new fancy 24 hour news cycle, 16 hours after the story breaks would be like plenty of time to do that. So it’s again a bit of a shock to find how “little coverage”:http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&edition=us&filter=0&filter=0&filter=0&filter=0&filter=0&q=%22Bandar+bin+Sultan%22+Woodward+oil+price&btnG=Search+News the story is getting. Only 21 stories worldwide, only 9 of them in America, and the vast bulk of them wire stories. (Including some from those lefty news outlets Bloomberg and Forbes.) Yep, that liberal media.
The hackneyed story about technology is that the young are always faster to pick it up than us old folk. So you’d expect in an academic department the graduate students would be the ones leading the way, and the professoriate would be constantly learning tricks from them. And while that’s true sometimes (I had to recruit Paul Neufeld of “ephilosopher”:http://www.ephilosopher.com/ fame to get started on Movable Type) my impression based on anecdotes as casual observation is that really doesn’t seem to be the general run of things. And certainly there’s lots of things about grad students could learn about technology from computer specialists. This suggests a professional question. How much technical knowledge/ability should we _require_ our graduate students to have.
As if there’s any other kind.
There’s been a ton of “blog commentary”:http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/search.html?rank=&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bu.edu%2Farion%2FPaglia_11.3%2FPaglia_Magic%2520of%2520Images.htm&sub=Go%21 on this “piece by Camille Paglia”:http://www.bu.edu/arion/Paglia_11.3/Paglia_Magic%20of%20Images.htm, which seems somewhat overrated to me, for much the reasons “Mark Liberman”:http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000772.html gives. But, as “Nicole Wyatt”:http://scribo.blogs.com/scribo/2004/04/blogs_and_argum.html notes, it raises an interesting question about what we’re doing when we’re blogging.
Many more such questions are raised by Geoff Nunberg’s nice FreshAir piece on Blogging – “The Global Lunchroom”:http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~nunberg/lunchroom.html. Geoff notes how cliquey the language bloggers use can be.
bq. The high, formal style of the newspaper op-ed page may be nobody’s native language, but at least it’s a neutral voice that doesn’t privilege the speech of any particular group or class. Whereas blogspeak is basically an adaptation of the table talk of the urban middle class — it isn’t a language that everybody in the cafeteria is equally adept at speaking.
A lot of people use fake, or altered, email addresses on comments threads, presumably because they want to avoid being flooded with spam. But it turns out that these are actually not that vulnerable to spammers harvesting.