blog.kennypearce.net

Philosopher's Carnival 98

Welcome to the 98th Philosopher's Carnival! The Philosopher's Carnival is a roundup of the best philosophy blog posts of the last three weeks or so. As host, I have selected the submissions (and a couple of non-submissions) which, in my opinion, will be of most interest to academic philosophers. There is necessarily some subjectivity here, so I apologize to anyone who feels he or she was unfairly excluded.

Metaphysics

• Steve Esser presents Notes on C.B.Martin's The Mind in Nature posted at Guide to Reality. This post summarizes Martin's work across a wide variety of metaphysical and especially ontological topics.
• Aaron presents A Note on the Semantics of First-Degree Entailment posted at Florida Student Philosophy Blog. This post points out some problems with the dialetheism of Graham Priest and others.
• Gary Williams presents Who and What is Dasein? posted at Minds and Brains. This post explains some key elements of Heidegger's ontology.

Epistemology

• E. M. Cadwaladr presents A Few Words on the Dangers of Language at his recently introduced self-titled blog. This is a programmatic post on epistemology and the theory of rationality. It is a little light on argument, but I think the viewpoint represented here will be of some interest to philosophers.
• Jonathan Schaffer presents X-Phi Data on Contrasts, Part Two posted at Certain Doubts. This post points to a draft paper with some experimental data on folk epistemology. The link to the paper in the main post is currently broken; one can find the paper here, and then go to the blog post to join the discussion.
• Richard Chappell presents Hallucination, Virtual Reality, and Reality posted at Philosophy, et cetera. I've put this in epistemology because of its relevance to brain-in-a-vat skepticism. It might as easily been classified in metaphysics, as one of its primary aims is the clarification of the concept of reality.

Philosophy of Mind

• Steven Handel presents The Hard Problem Of Consciousness: Is Science In Need Of Another Cognitive Revolution? posted at The Emotion Machine. This post discusses the relationship between introspective and neurological approaches to the study of consciousness and the question of how phenomenal experiences arise.
• Richard Brown announces a call for papers for The Second Consciousness Online conference.
• Antti Kauppinen presents Surveying Loose Talk posted at Experimental Philosophy. This post discusses the interpretation of some experimental data on folk conceptions of subjective experience.
• Kris Rhodes presents Swampman, Meet the Turing Test posted at The Extended Cognition Blog. Rhodes argues that 'swampman' cases provide a counter-example to the Turing test as an indicator of consciousness.
• Gualtiero Piccinini presents Some Questions on Heterophenomenology posted at Brains. This post discusses some issues related to the reliability of reports of first-person experience.

Philosophy of Religion

• My own contribution is entitled Leibniz's Theistic Case Against Humean Miracles. I summarize three arguments from Leibniz which are designed to show that classical theists shouldn't believe in violations of natural laws.

Aesthetics

• Dawn L. Low presents Conceptual Art and Craft posted at Dawn Xiana Moon: Randomness. This post discusses some recent trends in visual arts and music which tend toward the devaluation of 'craftsmanship.'

Ethics

As you may have noticed, the submissions for this carnival were pretty M&E (and especially mind) heavy. As such, I've taken the liberty of finding a couple of interesting (non-submitted) ethics posts for your consideration.

• Jeremy Pierce presents The Harms of Rape and the Harms of Racism posted at Parableman. Jeremy discusses some ways in which, in addition to the obvious harms to their direct victims, instances of rape and racism also harm men and whites, respectively.
• Douglas Portmore presents Subjective Utilitarianism: What is it good for? - Absolutely Nothing, posted at PEA Soup. This post discusses various issues related to acting ethically under uncertainty.

Posted by Kenny at October 19, 2009 2:02 PM