It’s been over a decade since I released the first edition of the open access logic textbook forall x. It’s been a few years since my last update, because it’s been a few years since I last taught logic.
A number of people have made their own editions of forall x over the years, but 2017 was a breakout year: Continue reading “A big year, forall x”
I was invited to participate in a book symposium about Anjan Chakravartty’s recent book Scientific Ontology. It is supposed to be a short, critical piece, so striking the right tone was difficult. I agree with Chakravartty on rather a lot, but there is little point in flagging where we concur. Also, because I focus on the issues that are of interest to me, there is the danger that it comes off as “so much about him, let’s talk about me”.
I’ve written it, though, and my final draft is up.
Since February 1999, I’ve had a web page about fallacies. Rather than regurgitating all of the usual ones that one can find elaborated in critical thinking textbooks, I collect fallacies which an author names for just one occasion. These one-offs don’t appear on the usual lists. Authors usually do this to condemn some specific target, one who has committed not some generic error in reasoning but the specific if newly-named fallacy of such-and-so.
Prompted by John Holbo at Crooked Timber, I’ve added three new specimens. One is coined tongue-in-cheek by Holbo himself to mock a book review by David Bentley Hart, and the other two are coined by Hart in his would-be hatchet job on Daniel Dennett’s book From Bacteria to Bach and Back.
Continue reading “Fallacies: Narcissan, pleonastic, and unnatural deceleration”
Net neutrality is under attack again, and my first defense of it is what I wrote back in July.
As a user of the internet, I want to be able to access the content which I decide matters. I want it to come at the same speed other content would come at, rather than having it be faster or slower based on whether someone who owns that content has decided to pay more for access to me. If they get control over accessability and relative speed, then I’m not a consumer anymore but instead I’m the product that the service provider sells to their customers. That’s why net neutrality matters.
I’ve read some contrarian arguments that net neutrality isn’t such a big deal, because platforms like Google, Facebook, and Twitter can still nudge traffic and content around according to their own private algorithms. Political agitations and manipulations via social media have shown the power of that. However, that only shows that net neutrality is not sufficient for a healthy internet.
It remains obvious to me that net neutrality is necessary for a healthy internet. Summoning more monsters won’t solve the monster problem.
Over at Crooked Timber, Harry Brighouse exhorts readers to write philosophical clerihews.
I was unfamiliar with the form, but it’s not complicated. A clerihew is a four-line poem about some person or other with an AABB rhyming pattern. The sort of thing Ogden Nash would have written if he’d been less pithy.1
I contributed a couple, and I shamelessly cut and paste them here.
The Scotsman Thomas Reid
had a commonsensical creed,
a fondness for calico cats,
and questionable taste in hats.
The mustachioed John Dewey
might have gone all kablam and kablooey
if he had not understood inquiry
in a way that avoided such injury.
Via Daily Nous, I learn that Pacific Philosophical Quarterly (PPQ) has begun offering an odd choice to authors. When a paper is accepted, the author can opt either to have their paper appear post haste in an on-line only issue or to wait years for their paper to appear in a print issue. Articles in the print issue will appear on-line at the time of publication.
The publisher insists that the on-line only issues and the print+on-line issues will be of the same prestige and significance. After all, a paper is accepted for publication before being assigned to one or the other.
As I wrote a while ago, my department is trying to drum up more graduate applications. One strategy is to send out encouraging e-mails. I’m endeavoring to write to all the philosophy departments in our corner of the country. I’m presently in the middle of that, so you might hear from me soon.
In the interests of maximizing reach, I’m posting the e-mail here too.
Making things publicly available, rather than just sending them if someone asks, is something philosophers in general don’t do enough.
I wrote this two levels deep in a thread on Facebook, and it’s a point worth making here.
I recently came across a passage that characterizes analytic philosophy in this way: “when it comes to constructing arguments, we beat words and ideas into submission.”2 I am ambivalent about identifying as an analytic philosopher, but I don’t really recognize myself in this at all.3
Philosophical prose is not written like poetry, but I’ve never felt it was like beating anything into submission. Reflecting on why that passage felt so wrong to me, I hit on a different analogy.
via The New Yorker, I learn that the outsider rock band The Shaggs recently had a reunion just down the road from me. Writer Howard Fishman asks
Was it fair to even call this band the Shaggs? Or was it, rather, a Shaggs cover band providing a live karaoke soundtrack for the Wiggins to sing along with?
As someone who once judged a contest in which contestants tackled the question of whether a band can be its own cover band, I can’t let this pass as just a rhetorical question.
Continue reading “Shagg Carpet would be a good name for a Shaggs cover band”
