Monthly Archives: February 2008

New Philosophers’ Carnival

Is here…
(It looks like there is some emphasis on philosophical humor…)

Nominalism About Properties - Part One

One version of nominalism holds that properties just are sets of things. There is no abstract universal red-ness. There just is a set of red things. The problem is that ordinary sentences of English look like they are talking about something that could only be something like a universal. There is no talk of sets.
Consider [...]

Personal Identity and Identical Twins

When I teach personal identity in Intro and Metaphysics, I often have a student suggest that what it takes to have the same person across time is for the persons to have the same DNA structure.
A good response to this has always been to point out that identical twins have the same DNA structure, but [...]

Counterfactuals With Impossible Antecedents

A common view in philosophy is that counterfactual conditionals with impossible antecedents are all vacuously true. But I’m very worried about that view. There are several counterfactuals with impossible antecedents that seem false. Here are some examples.
Counterfactuals involving Metaphyical ClaimsConsider Metaphysical Nihilism, the thesis that there are no composite objects (just simples). According to Nihilism, [...]

Philosophy Tenure Track Hires

For the past few years, Leiter has put up a post so people can announce new tenure-track hires in the comments thread. It’s kind of interesting to see who hires who.
Here’s the permanent link.
I imagine that most people who read this also read Leiter, but just in case you haven’t seen it yet - [...]

Begging the Question

This starts off as what purports to be a discussion of the misuse of the expression “begging the question”…
Half way through the article, it stops being serious and gets pretty funny.
But it’s worth noting that before the article goes humorous, the author gives an example of a valid modus tollens as begging the question. [...]

College Opportunity and Affordability Act = Network Filtering

Colleges are going to have to start screening their networks to try and curb illegal file sharing and downloading.
I don’t know much about the logistics of Information Technology Departments on a college campus, but this seems like it’s one more headache for our already overburdened IT departments. IT people are busy enough, and now [...]

An Argument Against Materialism

A lot of materialists will admit that there are some kinds of entities that are a little more difficult to make sense of within a materialist ontology. For example - propositions. Here’s an argument for immaterialism that I encountered that seems to be aimed at materialists who would accept the existence of propositions.
I’ve encountered this [...]

The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotations

A former student pointed this blog out. It’s great…especially for those of us who like to encourage students to be mindful of use-mention confusion.
(hat-tip: Justin - check his blog out here. It’s called “Broadly Construed”)