Monthly Archives: April 2009

David Lewis on The Number of Functional Roles

In On the Plurality of Worlds David Lewis resists an objection to his view by appealing to functionalism. The problem is roughly that for any number of worlds you suppose are in the pluriverse, you’ll be committed to the absurd thesis that there are more worlds than there really are. Here is the argument.Continue Reading

What If You Owned Your Own Internet Connection?

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Helen Frowe Talks on Campus Today and Tomorrow

Helen Frowe is giving two talks this week as part of our Young Philosophers Podcast Lecture Series.Her first talk is tonight. Her second talk is tomorrow. Here’s the flyer. And here are a few more details.Continue Reading

Open SUNY

I’ve started a group here on campus to help promote and support the use of open source software on campus. Right now our site is called Open SUNY. When I tell people on campus that we should consider making the switch to open source software, I often here something like – “Yeah, but who’s goingContinue Reading

Open Source and the Environment

I’ve been asked to present at a campus Earth Week event on open source software, the environment, and social justice. As with the “9 Cool Web Apps Post“, I’ll be using this post as a kind of handout that people at the talk can go back to. I hope off-campus readers will get something outContinue Reading

Three Millian Ways to Resolve Open Questions – Published

My paper “Three Millian Ways to Resolve Open Questions” was just published today! Here’s the link to the online version. Because the Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy is an open access journal that link takes you to the official, final copy of the article, and I am allowed to link to it. Pretty amazing.Continue Reading

Cure Windows Virus with Ubuntu Live CD

It’s like noble medics offering to heal the wounded enemy…for free. Gotta love open source.Continue Reading

Logical Notation in OpenOffice 3.0

The recent version of Open Office makes it very easy for philosophers to insert logical notation into their papers. It’s done through by adding special commands into the AutoCorrect Feature. This post will show you how to do that. Suppose you want the existential quantifier to automatically replace ‘/e’ – Here’s what you do.Continue Reading

Linguistic Data that Knowledge Doesn’t Entail Truth

I think knowledge entails truth, but I like to keep an eye out for uses of ‘knows’ and its cognates that suggest otherwise. This one just poppped up on Digg today. First sentence of the article: “Contrary to what was known, all octopuses are venomous, a new study finds.”Continue Reading

New Version of Ubuntu Comes Out Next Week

The newest version of Ubuntu, an open-source Linux operating system, comes out in just a week. The beta has been out for a while. I don’t know if I can wait. Since I don’t have to pay the folks at Canonical for this awesome piece of software, I figured that the least I can doContinue Reading