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.

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

I’m directing an independent study this summer on Experimental Philosophy.
We’re starting with the new reader by Knobe and Nichols. I’ll probably be posting about some of it soon.
So far we’re through the manifesto and the section on cross-cultural differences.
We spent most of our time talking about “Normativity and Epistemic Intuitions”

The zombie argument for dualism is commonly misunderstood. [For a broad overview and assessment of the argument, see my 'Zombie Review'.] In particular, misunderstanding the precise role conceivability plays in the argument often leads to overly hasty dismissals. In this post, I want to set out and correct three such misunderstandings. Let me begin on a conciliatory note by emphasizing that many conceivability arguments are no good.