sympoze

One of our species’ signature capacities, Deacon argues, is symbol-usage. Symbols permeate our practices to such an extent that even our success in mating depends on our acquiring complex social skills for negotiating symbolically mediated transactions. “Thus,” he avers, “because of symbols and with the aid of symbols, Homo sapiens has been self-domesticated and adapted to a niche unlike any other that ever has existed. We have been made in the image of the word.”

LaTeX for Philosophers (LfP) has been updated. Description of LfP: Philosophy.sty is designed to set any LaTeX2e article document class file according to current formatting conventions within philosophy. It is ideally suited for submitting manuscripts to conferences or journals, where only a printable pdf is required. The output is designed to make your manuscript appear as though it was prepared with standard word processing software.

DreamHost is running a New Year's promotion right now. 95% off a 2 year hosting agreement which works out to $10.47.

Beneath the fold, I have stolen some text that lists 12 principles that make intellectual argument possible. In turn, this list was taken from Attacking Faulty Reasoning: A Practical Guide to Fallacy-Free Arguments by Edward T. Damer, which was recommended in comments by G. Felis.
I have added in italics my own comments interspersing the more [...]Snowflake

Sympoze now has an easy to use bookmarklet. Sympoze users can put it in their Web Browser bookmark toolbar. It enables Sympoze users to easily submit sites to Sympoze that they like. Philosophy bloggers can embed the code in their blog posts to enable easy submission of their blog posts.

Plurals and Deferred Ostension
I was trying to use some other examples of deferred ostension in order to put some constraints on what might be happening with the ‘we’ in “We won 4-2 last night”. The canonical example is (1)
(1) The ham sandwich is getting impatient.
This manages to communicate that the person who ordered the ham sandwich is getting impatient. That is, “the ham sandwich” somehow manages to pick out the person who ordered the ham sandwich.

After a long testing period, TeXlive 2009 was released yesterday. This is a great LaTeX and XeLaTeX distribution for every OS.

It is not at all obvious how best to draw the distinction between conditional and unconditional desires. In this paper we examine extant attempts to analyse conditional desire. From the failures of those attempts, we draw a moral that leads us to the correct account of conditional desires. We then extend the account of conditional desires to an account of all desires. It emerges that desires do not have the structure that they have been thought to have. We attempt to explain the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic desire in light of our account of desire.

There's an interesting short research report in Cortex about how a national symbol adopted in Italy after the 1980 terrorist bombing of Bologna train station likely instilled a false memory about the following 16 years.

On the morning of August 2nd, 1980, at 10.25, a bomb exploded in Bologna Centrale station, killing eighty-five people wounding over 200.