Uncategorized

• Stuff White People Like is funny. While the reactions in comments at Unfogged are nigh unreadable, Ogged’s response is dead on.
• Why engineers may be over-represented in terrorist cells. From the same guy who brought you Science vs Faith.
• The conventional wisdom is that the Clinton campaign is this super-professional, well-funded, well-organized machine, right? Well their money problems are well known; but who would’ve thought that, after staking basically the entire primary on Texas and Ohio, the Clinton campaign is just now getting around to looking at the delegate rules in Texas?!

This graphic gets it exactly right. The people at Browse Happy are also completely correct.

1. Immanuel Kant, “What is Enlightenment?”
2. Sentential logic reading 1 – (do even numbered problems in all exercises)
3. Sentential logic reading 2 – (do even numbered problems in all exercises)
4. Sentential logic exercise answers
5. Edmund Gettier, “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?”
6. Essay 1 Instructions
7. Jaegwon Kim, “Lonely Souls: Causality and Substance Dualism”
8. Dean W. Zimmerman, “Two Cartesian Arguments for the Simplicity of the Soul”
9. Frank Jackson, “What Mary Didn’t Know”
10. Theodore Sider, “Personal Identity,” “Free Will and Determinism”
11. Stewart Shapiro, “Faith and Reason, the Perpetual War”
12. David Lewis, “Divine Evil”
13. Harry Frankfurt, “Moral Responsibility and Alternate Possibilities”
14. P. F. Strawson, “Freedom and Resentment”

Kripke on possible worlds:

What seems to be more objectionable is that [the problem of identity conditions for material objects over time] depends on the wrong way of looking at what a possible world is. One thinks, in this picture, of a possible world as if it were like a foreign country. One looks upon it as an observer. Maybe Nixon has moved to the other country and maybe he hasn’t, but one is given only qualities. One can observe all his qualities, but, of course, one doesn’t observe that someone is Nixon…

But isn’t that “foreign country” understanding of possible worlds pretty prevalent? And if it is, who’s to blame?

Some logicians in their formal treatment of modal logic may encourage this picture. A prominent example, perhaps, is myself. Nevertheless, intuitively speaking, it seems to me not to be the right way of thinking about the possible worlds. A possible world isn’t a distant country that we are coming across, or viewing through a telescope…A possible world is given by the descriptive conditions we associate with it. (Naming and Necessity, pp. 43-44)

I only post this because: (1) well, it’s pretty easy to slip into “foreign country” thinking about possible worlds, and (2) “it’s not a distant country” reminded me of “it’s not a big truck” (and here’s an even better version).

I just found out that it’s possible to write TeX and LaTeX code directly into Wordpress. Since I’m (still) not blogging that much anymore, this won’t result in any significant new developments around here, but it’s nice to know that such capability exists.

I’ve followed Finkelstein’s career for quite some time, and I value his scholarship.  No one has been able thus far to provide a credible explanation of his tenure denial – besides political motivations, that is.

More here.

And please, if you support academic freedom, consider signing the petition here. 

by Samih Al-Qasim, from Sadder Than Water

Hear, O people of Israel, the voice of the prophets!
Hear, ye people of Aaron, the call!
We issue the order to the wretched apostates,
to all good and God-fearing men:
Worship the graven images of Washington!
Rise, now, and worship them!
Mix with the murderous idols of Bonn!
Offer your children on petroleum’s altars!
And keep them in your hearts.
Destroy the inhabited homes in their names
and kneel at the feet of Canaan!
People of Judah,
it matters not if your mansions
are turned into desert sands.
Hallelujah! Hallelujah!