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Philosophical Cure from xkcd

On hiatus ...

... for an unspecified amount of time.

A man with a martini glass walks into a bar ...

I'm teaching Analytic Philosophy this year. It's an odd sort of course, set up like a history course in its scope (Frege to Gettier!), and yet covering material still recent enough that there isn't the kind of secondary literature that we often use to guide us through a period. That literature is only just getting started. Of course to add to the difficulty, I decided to start with philosophy of language. Intellectually that makes some sense, since language is a central issue for almost everyone in the period. But Russell, Frege and Strawson don't make for an easy start to the term, especially since some of the students have only one prior course in philosophy.  Worse, unlike Gillian Russell, who has some good ideas for starting a philosophy of language course, I don't have a whole term to talk about these issues, but instead a paultry three weeks.

This has meant I have had to be creative. So I have been turning the various examples in the literature into group exercises, which have worked surprisingly well. Now if only I can figure out how to do this for the metaphysics section! I include two examples that worked particularly well (both inspired by Donnellan) under the fold.

Cancellable implicatures

Back in February Matt Weiner wrote a nice little paper with three examples designed to show that not all implicatures are cancellable. Unfortunately I didn't know it was a nice little paper at the time, since I didn't actually get around to reading it. (This is particularly embarassing since it is only six pages.)

However, it has now been accepted to Analysis, and this time I did read the paper. I liked it so much that instead of writing up my commentary for next weekends WCPA (sorry Kevan, I'll do it  tomorrow) I spent the afternoon writing up this little comment on what I think is going on here (wyatt_implicatures.pdf ).

Edit: updated the comment a little, link similarly updated.

Google Wildcard searches

Early this month Language Log bemoaned the new weird behaviour of the google wildcard. Now a possible explanation presents itself via the google blog -- apparently the wildcard search now features "softer pattern matching".

Perhaps a note to google requesting our old wildcard back as well -- using # for example -- is in order.

Intelligent Design

A public service announcement: an article on "intelligent design"  from the National Center for Science Education.

I'm posting this link due to Leiter's suggestion that we use google bombing for good.

A teaching philosophy blog

Here's a little plug for a new-to-me blog devoted to the teaching of philosophy: Metatome.

Eye Evolution

Neither philosophical nor linguistic, but cool nonetheless: the European Molecular Biology Lab is reporting on their account of the evolution of the human eye. In the nifty category:

[EMBL researchers traced the evolution of the eye] by studying a 'living fossil,' Platynereis dumerilii, a marine worm that still resembles early ancestors that lived up to 600 million years ago. Arendt had seen pictures of this worm's brain taken by researcher Adriaan Dorresteijn [University of Mainz, Germany]. "When I saw these pictures, I noticed that the shape of the cells in the worm’s brain resembled the rods and cones in the human eye. I was immediately intrigued by the idea that both of these light-sensitive cells may have the same evolutionary origin."

PhOnline

Just in case you haven't yet seen this at another philosophy blog, Richard Heck has set up a searchable database of online philosophy at Philosophy Papers Online. Since the site aspires to be the Philosopher's Index of online work;

Membership is open only to members of philosophy faculties (and faculty in similar departments, such as departments of logic or metaphysics) in accredited institutions of higher education.

You'll need to register as an author and then insert your papers into the database.

They are a prophet

Most people who pass by here probably read language log, but for those who I know don't, Geoff Pullum has a wonderful little snippit on singular they.