A long time ago I wrote a not particularly good piece on the tautology problem: that natural selection is merely circular definition. I was just out of being an undergraduate when it was published, so it was at best an undergraduate piece. I have been unsatisfied with it ever since. So I will from time to time post on this. To start, what’s the history?

By Australia's ABC national radio, featuring Simon Longstaff and me, here.

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.

Let's get a little down to earth here at PEA Soup: I may have to confront an actual ethical quandary in a few months, and I'd be interested in hearing people's thoughts about how I ought to respond.

The tortured souls over at The Philosophy Smoker have posted some crushing news about the economic condition of some institutions of higher learning. It's clear that this year's job market is going to be horrific. Maybe we'll even get another "Dear John, You'll never get a job" letter from the APA? Anyway, here's a question:

This report Frinom the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, citing an article in the June 1 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, says that differences between boys’ and girls’ performance on standardized mathematics tests correlates with the level of gender equity and other socio-cultural factors in the country in which the test was taken.
The study’s co-author says:

A young philosopher writes: Here is a question on the ethics of teaching philosophy in a small department. I can imagine circumstances in which a philosopher only gets to teach one course a year in their specialism (because the department...Brian Leiter

Since it came up in the comments on the previous post, what about language requirements? My own view is that they're useless in Philosophy as a departmental requirement. To explain: students working on dissertations on, say, Aristotle, certainly need to acquire a serious command of Greek, whereas students working on, say, deflationism probably have no use for any foreign language at all (they'd be better off learning more logic). So students working on dissertations in areas which require work in foreign languages should be required to acquire them at the level appropriate for their work.

[New Entry by C.A.J. (Tony) Coady on April 29, 2009.]
Should political leaders violate the deepest constraints of morality in order to achieve great goods or avoid disasters for their communities? This question poses what has become known amongst philosophers as the problem of dirty hands. There are many different strands to the philosophical debate about this topic, and they echo many of the complexities in more popular thinking about politics and...C.A.J. (Tony) Coady

I’ve just read T.M. Scanlon’s chapter on blame in his latest book Moral Dimensions. The discussion is subtle, provocative, and quite insightful. It has already caused me to rethink some of my own views on moral responsibility in general and blame in particular. Nevertheless, I have a few questions/worries about the account that may be worth discussing over the course of a few posts. In this post, I’ll just focus on his account of moral responsibility, and in later posts I hope to focus on his accounts of blame and the ethics of blaming.