Blogs

The real problem with giving a philosophical lightweight and poseur like Critchley a public platform is the damage it does to the image and reputation of philosophy, including, importantly, the Continental traditions in philosophy. I linked in my earlier piece... Brian Leiter

Myles Burnyeat, John Roemer, T. M. Scanlon, and Philippe Van Parijs will be speaking at a memorial for Jerry Cohen on Saturday, June 19, at 2.15 pm, in the Codrington Library of All Souls College, Oxford. There will also be a reception in Jerry’s memory at the UCL Philosophy Department on Thursday, June 17, at [...] 0

For the last couple of weeks I have been in Oxford giving the John Locke Lectures on Constructing the World. The title is an homage to Rudolf Carnap's 1928 book Der Logische Aufbau Der Welt. The lectures are based on a book I have been writing for the last couple of years, trying to execute a project that is reminiscent of Carnap's in certain respects. I haven't put this material online until now in order not to pre-empt the lectures, but I will be putting chapters online as I give the corresponding lecture each Wednesday. So far you can find the introduction and the first three chapters. Also, the Oxford website has audio for lecture 1 and lecture 2, as well as slides and handouts. More of this material will go online each week, and I'm told that there will eventually be video too. It has been very good to be back in Oxford, and I'm grateful to everyone here for their hospitability to date. David Chalmers

Putting Powers to Work

A Conference on Causal Powers in Metaphysics
April 28-30, 2011
Saint Louis University

Description

This conference aims to build on the existing literature concerning what causal powers (or dispositions or capacities) are by asking what causal powers can do. Many contemporary metaphysicians think that accepting irreducible causal powers enables one to give accounts of, say, laws of nature, causation, and modality that are preferable to other contemporary accounts. But is that right? What should those accounts look like? Are there other areas in metaphysics—metaphysics of mind and agency, or metaphysics of science—that can be accounted for at least in part in terms of irreducible causal powers? In other words, supposing for the sake of argument that you accepted irreducible causal powers or dispositions, what good might they do for us in metaphysics?

Speakers include Nancy Cartwright, Alexander Bird, Anjan Chakravartty, John Heil, Max Kistler, Stephen Mumford, Timothy O'Connor, David Robb, and Neil Williams. Funded by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation and by the Department of Philosophy at Saint Louis University.

Workshop Call for Papers

A workshop will follow the conference on the afternoon of April 30. The workshop will be a roundtable discussion of papers on the theme and questions of the conference. Presentations will be 20-30 minutes. A committee may select papers from the workshop for inclusion in the conference edited collection. We invite submissions for the workshop program. Email an abstract to jonathandjacobs@gmail.com. If the committee cannot reach a decision on the basis of the abstract, it may ask for the full paper. Deadline for submission is December 1, 2010.

For more information, see the conference website, or email Jonathan D. Jacobs at jonathandjacobs@gmail.com. Registration is free.

Registration is now open for the 2010 conference of the British Society for Ethical Theory, to be held at the University of Nottingham, 7th-9th July. (This is the period directly before the 2010 Joint Session.) Details of the programme and registration forms are available here: http://www.bset.org.uk/nextconference.html Keynote speakers: Jamie Dreier (Brown) Tim Mulgan (St. Andrews) [...] 2

There is a fantastic “Author Meets Critics” event being held at Stanford this week, which will discuss Professor Charles Beitz’s book, The Idea of Human Rights. Friday, May 14, 2010 Philippines Room-3rd Floor Encina Hall Stanford University 12:15 -5:00pm Critics: Barbara Herman (Philosophy, UCLA) Tim Scanlon (Philosophy, Harvard) Jenny Martinez (Law, Stanford) James Fearon (Political [...] 0

I’m headed off to St Andrews tomorrow for my annual stint as a professorial fellow at Arché. I’m looking forward to it a lot. I end up having most of my ideas for the year while I’m over there, and spend the intervening 10 months writing stuff up. This trip will be busier than most. [...]

I imagine many readers of this blog will have already seen Paul Bloom’s NYT magazine article on the moral life of babies. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in there, but I wanted to focus on something about false beliefs that surprised me. Here’s what Bloom says. The new studies found that babies have an actual [...]

I love hearing about tricks and stunts that people have used as part of their teaching strategy in lectures. I have just been reading Williamson's description of his technique for setting up real life Gettier cases: To make the point... logican http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~grussell grussell@artsci.wustl.edu General