Total fluff

Yesterday's Achewood comic strip, for those of you who (unfortunately) don't read it:

Embarassment?

This summer I'm working at a summer camp with a bunch of marine biologists and volcanologists, and so of course I'm repping Swarthmore's philosophy department by wearing our Thomas Nagel-reference t-shirt all the time. Turns out that, according the one of the biologists here, the illustration on the t-shirt is of a type of bat called a "flying fox," endemic to Australia and iconicly depicted in the Batman logo.

Problem is, flying foxes don't use echolocation. Which is a big part of the Nagel's point about the limits of our understanding of the subjective character of consciousness!

What's the first person plural form of "mea culpa"?

anti-Humeian business practices, and other news

I just have to share this gem from today's mail:

(Also, distinction!)

Oh, but, speaking of American Consumers and Travelers, let me tell you about my recent traveling! Last week, I visited Swarthmore for a few days. (The beach is all dug-up!)

It was weird to be on campus again — it felt sort of like a very-vivid dream. But got boring again pretty fast, so I spent most of the time off-campus, hanging out with these people:

There were other people too, but those are the ones who do philosophy.

Anyway, after that I drove up to Vermont to witness some wedding action.
And then I spent a couple of days in Bethesda, Maryland with this lady.
I got back on Friday, and now (well, tomorrow) I'm headed to Israel. Hope this has been informative and entertaining, even if lacking in philosophical content. Keep posting!

Endurantism, Perdurantism, and Moral Philosophy

So I've been thinking a lot recently about this distinction that arises in metaphysics and philosophy of time (and evidently philosophy of identity too, but I don't know so much about that approach) between two positions, which I'll define below (with some help from Wikipedia):

Perdurantism: The perspective that objects (or entities) have distinct temporal parts, and thus one's "identity" is defined as its time-slice at a given moment (another way of cashing this out would be to index one's identity to some time)

Endurantism: The perspective that objects (or entities) are wholly present at every moment in time, and thus one's "identity" may span a set of individual times (again, maybe cashed out by saying that the object at time t1 must be the same as the object at t2, essentially or metaphysically or something).

I have my own views on how philosophy of physics (specifically relativistic space-time physics) ought to impact which one of these positions we take to be more viable, but I've been looking in a different direction recently and am interested in your thoughts. Do you think that perdurantists or endurantists are committed (either de facto or de jure) to certain positions on the value of promises and personal responsibility? For instance, it seems to me that one might reasonably complain that the perdurantist is likely to undervalue both responsibility and promise-making (compared to the endurantist), but I know very little about philosophical work done on morality, so I'm hoping someone more morally/ethically/socially/politically/continentally informed than I am can help me out here?

Is It Enough (or Even Permissible) to be a Professional Philosopher?

We all know that Plato thought that once one has been liberated from the cave, learned that the world is more than images, come to to understand the forms and, finally, experienced the Good, it is one's responsibility to go back into the cave and rescue the unfortunate prisoners still inside. In Plato's mind, as a philosopher it is one's responsibility to lead people to a Good life in a Just society. Hence, in the Republic, philosophers are kings.

Suppose we think this is a good idea, for the Republic, that we concede the point that philosophers are best fit to lead Plato's Just society, given their reasoning ability and knowledge of the forms. What, then, would we say about having a career in academic philosophy?

Clearly, 21st century society in the USA is quite different from that of Ancient Greece. Along with political, economic and technical changes, the role of the philosopher has been altered over the past 2500 years. With the division of labor and the specialization of the university, philosophy is an exercise conducted in armchairs and classrooms.

Assuming that in order to "be a philosopher" one must be an academic philosopher, are contemporary philosophers living up to their responsibility to go "back into the cave," or does the institution of the university make it impossible to fulfill this duty? If philosophers are concerned with the Good life and Just society, is it enough to teach college and graduate students? Should philosophers be more engaged in public life?

Moreover, as college graduates contemplating our futures, how should we weigh the idea of pursuing a PhD in philosophy versus, say, one in public policy, or against going into the workforce for a worthy non-profit?

I'm not sure of my opinion on these questions, but I do believe that being an academic philosopher is not enough, if one values things such as a Good life and Just society. It seems to me that academic philosophers need to go further into the cave, perhaps meaning they begin teaching younger students or those who can't afford top-flight educations, or that they engage in more practical activities in which their superior powers of reasoning could be of great public benefit.

What do you guys think?

--Alex

Inaugural Post

Hooray, we have a blog!

That is, we will have a blog, as soon as y'all start posting! I've collected some Exemplary Philosophy Blog Posts to inspire you. Here are some kinds of things you can write (and read) here:

Substantive philosophy stuff:

• "I'm reading this great article": e.g. Is Morality More Like Math or Art? @ Thoughts Arguments and Rants; Lewis Carroll's critique of Disjunctivism @ There is Some Truth in That
• "I went to this great lecture": e.g. Canon and Fanon @ Go Grue (woot, Ian Flora '05!)

Institutionalized-philosophy stuff:

• Philosophy and life: e.g. Ethicists Steal More Books? @ The Splintered Mind
• Prejudice & exclusion in philosophy: e.g. You're Like School in the Summertime — No Class @ Feminist Philosophers. (Also, see their other minorities-in-philosophy posts.)
• Professional academia stuff: e.g. APA Anti-Discrimination Policy Violators @ Leiter Reports

Posts that Solicit Comments:

• Opinion poll: e.g. Best Philosophical Writers @ Unideal Observers
• Soliciting Intuitions: e.g. Intutions as Evidence? @ There Is Some Truth in That; Intuitions about Property @ Unideal Observers
• Soliciting recommendations: e.g. African Phil of Religion @ Prosblogion, or Summer Reading @ Atoms Arranged Meaningwise
• Help with a text: e.g. Problem with Zarathustra @ Florida Student Philosophy Blog
• X-and-philosophy: e.g. Indiana Jones @ Talking Philosophy
• Riddles: e.g. The Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever @ UCSB

Anything else we'd want to read:

• Real Life News: e.g. Geneva & Paris @ Phlox; Congratulations @ Unideal Observers
• Videos: e.g. Quine @ Knowledge and Experience; Albert v. Carroll on Phil of Time @ Leiter Reports
• Stories: e.g. Greco Experiences the Principle of Charity at Work @ Certain Doubts; Daughter's Theory of Moral Desert @ Garden of Forking Paths
• Jokes: e.g., this one @ Atoms Arranged Meaningwise:

An analytic philosopher and a continental philosopher walk into a bar. The bartender asks, “wadda ya havin?” The continental philosopher replies, “I will require an authentic, discursively enjoined, post-structuralist, disimmediated thing-in-itself.”

The bartender shakes his head and says, “I don’t get what you want.” The continental philosopher turns his nose up in the air and storms out of the bar. The bartender looks apologetically to the analytic philosopher and says, “I really couldn’t understand him.”

“Oh, I know!” replies the analytic philosopher. “As for me, I’ll have the same, without the adjectives.”

(This pep talk was brought to you by Swacrates, Our Founder, and by the "z" in Nietzsche, not pictured here.)

Pre-Inaugural Post