sympoze

A nice link from Leiter to a story about UCLA's financial situation---just one of the state-funded campuses severely affected by California's horrible budget crisis. The situation is, to say the least, grim.

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.

New York Times
YOU STUDY PHILOSOPHY. HOW DOES THIS RELATE TO YOUR CABIN WORK? Well, part of the plan is to spend some time up there free of distraction to do some reading ...

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...).

Teaching philosophy in prison.

While Timothy Williamson argues that philosophical thought experiments are counterfactual in form, Jonathan Ichiwaka argues that thought experiments only generate stories in the same way works of fiction do. Brian Williamson tries to reconcile these two positions by arguing that some works of fiction do take on a counterfactual form (if the story were true, then certain propositions would be true).

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 this post, I propose an argument against Joshua Earlenbaugh and Bernard Molyneux overall thesis in their paper “Intuitions are Inclinations to Believe.”

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.