I had a meeting with a graduate student today about preparing for the job market. It was illuminating in the usual way: students often go very far in their graduate education before considering the realities concerning employment, salary, teaching loads, geography, and such.Anyway, I think this issue has come up before, but I'm curious about whether others would agree with a bit of advice I gave. The student has been invited to contribute an essay to an edited collection and she asked whether she should accept the invitation. I told her no.

I’ve said it a couple of times before, and I’ll say it again - Twitter makes it suprisingly easy to keep up with what’s going on in philosophy. It’s my favorite thing about Twitter.
One neat thing we’re seeing now is philosophers twittering about what’s going on at a conference they’re attending…live. You don’t get tons of details, but it’s still kind of nice to get an occasional tweet about what’s going on at a conference.

Contra the suggestion of Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch that the hierarchical processing required for syntactical operations requires Broca's area, central to language, Friedrich and Friederici find MRI evidence that syntactic processing of abstract mathematical formulae involves mainly intraparietal and prefrontal regions:

Ichikawa refutes Williamson.

Al Mele is discussed briefly in the New York Times. (HT: Garden of Forking Paths: http://gfp.typepad.com/the_garden_of_forking_pat/2009/06/mele-in-the-nyt...).

In yesterday’s post I discussed a debate between Ichikawa and Williamson about the nature of argments based on thought experiments. Although they have differences of opinions about how exactly these arguments work, they actually agree on quite a lot. For one thing, they agree that it is facts about the thought experiment itself, and not facts about how we think about the thought experiment (e.g.

It turns out there is no statistically significant difference between ethicists, other philosophers, or non-philosophers in their responsiveness to students. This is taken as one method to see whether ethicists are any more ethical than other academics.

In recent years, though, advances in cognitive science have made it ... Boroditsky researches cognitive science and symbolic systems - thought and language. ...

Today we began studying Sosa’s Epistemology in Professor Kvanvig’s Epistemology seminar. We finished Zagzebski’s Virtues of the Mind last week, and as I made my way through it I noticed some potential problems regarding her views on the acquisition of virtues. In the book Zagzebski outlines a  motivation-based virtue theory, which includes an account of intellectual virtues for the purpose of an epistemic application.

Synthese, Volume 166, Number 2 (January 2009), pages 231–250.
Main authors discussed: Herman Cappelen, Keith DeRose, Nikola Kompa, Ernie Lepore, Jason Stanley
On what is arguably the standard view in contemporary philosophy of language, an expression is context sensitive if its semantic contribution to…Iris Einheuser