Wide Scope A philosophy blog that ranges over philosophy and other fun stuff.

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I’ll be on the road a lot this summer, so I’m testing out different blogging options from my G1. I’ll be posting something that actually does some philosophy soon. ...

We’re officially on break now. That means it’s time to play around with Wordpress themes. This one is called Panorama. I kind of like minimalist wordpress themes, and this one is not very minimalist. I don’t know how long I’ll be able to stick with it. If I do keep it, I definitely need to do ...

I read this post this morning over at Tech Crunch. Amazon has started Kindle Publishing for Blogs. Here’s the weird thing. Anyone can put any RSS feed and sell it to Kindle users - even if they are not the authors. I thought I’d test it out with my blog to see if I could ...

I’ve been on a David Lewis kick recently. Here’s more. David Lewis considers two different epistemic objections to Lewisian Modal Realism (hereafter LMR). The first argues that modal realism is incompatible with modal knowledge. The second is that modal realism is incompatible with knowledge about the external world. I want to talk about the second ...

There’s a new research foundation called the Northern Institute for Philosophy (NIP) that will be starting up at Aberdeen this September. That by itself is kind of exciting. Then I learned that they have a journal in the works. [HT:Dan Cavedon-Taylor] From the description it looks like it is Analysis-esque. This makes it even more ...

UPDATE: I think Mike Almeida is right. The response I lay out won’t work. Suppose you have the option of saving a drowning child. Further suppose that Lewisian Modal Realism is true. Here are your options. SAVE THE CHILD You save the child. However, consider what is true about the pluriverse if you save the child. If you ...

I like evidentialism. (EJ) S is justified in believing P iff P is best supported by S’s total evidence. I also like phenomenal conservatism. (PC) If it seems to S that P and S has no defeaters for P, then S is justified believing P. I take it that seemings (absent defeaters) are a kind of supporting evidence so ...

My first review for Philosopher’s Digest was posted today. Here’s the link. It’s on Jonathan Vogel’s paper “Epistemic Bootstrapping” in The Journal of Philosophy (September 2008) ...

I thought it would be fun (and useful) post the top links on Sympoze for the month. These are the top 14 from April. Basically anything that received 4 or more up votes is on this list. Enjoy. Richard Chappell’s post “Misleading Philosophical Jargon” led the pack with 6 votes. Misleading Philosophical Jargon X-Phi on Williamson, Willamson ...