Scottish Nous

Change You Can Believe In?

[From Socks and Barney]

Footnote Three

From Manuel Vargas' (2005) "Compatibilism Evolves?: On Some Varieties of Dennett Worth Wanting" in Metaphilosophy 36(4): 461:

In a Dennettian spirit we could call Dennett’s view DDAMN, for Dennett’s DArwinian Materialist Naturalism. But if Dennett’s view is DDAMNed, then its critics who are Generally Opposed to Dennett’s Darwinian Materialist Naturalism would end up being GODDAMNed. So, I’ll just leave these acronyms alone.

More Rylean Acerbity

FROM THE EDITOR OF MIND

     MAGDALEN COLLEGE

      OXFORD OX1 4AU

     August 24th, 1970.

Dear Mr. Feldman,

I am sorry but for many years MIND had to keep the door shut against contributions which are entirely or primarily expository.  Your paper seems to be expository both of Leibniz and of Russell's interpretation of Leibniz and I am afraid I can do nothing with it.  This is not a polite way of saying that the thing is no good since, to be frank, I haven't even read it.

Yours sincerely,

G. Ryle

Typewritten Notice From Fritz Warfield's Door

FROM THE EDITOR OF MIND

     MAGDALEN COLLEGE

                OXFORD

    December 29, 1967.

Dear Mr. Feldman,

I am returning your paper.  There may be a little in it, but it doesn't seem to cut enough ice.

Yours sincerely,

G. Ryle

Lingua Pranca

The linguist's version of Special Creationism: Wrathful Dispersion Theory.  Far more amusing than the FSM ever was:

Wrathful Dispersion is couched in more cautiously neutral language; rather than tying linguistic diversity to a specific biblical event, it merely argues that the differences among modern languages are too perverse to have arisen spontaneously, and must therefore be the work of some wrathful (and powerful) disperser who deliberately set out to accomplish a confusion of tongues. When asked in court to speculate about the possible identity of the disperser, Michael Moringa, a prominent proponent of WD, demurred, saying that the theory makes no claims about the answer to that question, and that it certainly does not insist that the Disperser is the God of Genesis.

From the comment thread at Pharyngula:

The fact remains that Grimmism's "language evolution" has never been demonstrated under scientific conditions. You can put a Chinese speaker, an English speaker, and a speaker of any Altaic* language you like together in the same room, but will they end up speaking Japanese? Hardly!

I'm a bit behind on this.  Oh well.  Also see: Language Log and Spec Gram.

Philosophical Agreement

Dennett claims:

David Chalmers and I have discussed this for what seems an indeterminable number of years, and he candidly grants that he has no arguments in favor of qualia that I haven't rebutted to his satisfaction, he just can't let go of the belief in them. [link]

Chalmers retorts:

In any case, I'm pleased to report that in private e-mail, Dan not only retracted the attribution, but candidly acknowledged that he now thinks that the arguments for his view are all unsound, and that he now privately favors Cartesian dualism. [link]

The Best Of...

... blog comment threads.  If you never wondered why some philosophers love to reason by analogy, well, look no further.

Frege Comes With Both Morning Star and Evening Star Accessory

(Only one accessory included.)  Earth! Fire! Wind! Water! Heart! Anyways... get your Philosophical Powers on. I want the Noumenal Self (R) Kant. [Via The Plurality of Blogs]

Exposing UCLA's Radical Professors

The Bruin Alumni Association, an group of boring reactionaries confused about who they should be reacting to,  is running the blog UCLAProfs.com.  Mark Sawyer, a political science professor, is profiled on the blog and given a "three black fists" rating.  His response:

I now have tenure ... I have been away from UCLA for 2 1/2 years at Berkeley and Harvard.  I have been active though in the anti-war movement etc.  So I feel I deserve 5 fists.

Rock on!   Kieran Healy jestingly awards the site one-half of a McCarthy for being pretty boring.  The group of Bruins fans is paying students $100 for information on the UCLA radical left.   Draw your own conclusions.  I side with Eugene Volokh's opinions expressed here and here.  This is not a group of disgruntled alumni to be at all concerned about.  For example, the group seemed irritated that one professor opposed the judicial nomination of... a fellow alumni!  Because you've just got to have the back of anyone who attended your university, I suppose.  Go Bruins!

Just Bizarre

Beth Agnew finds grading her student's papers so f-ing hilarious that she can't stop laughing.  Check out the (large) video here.  Or learn how to instruct your students in relieving their pre-final exam stress here.  Can you even begin to imagine the improvement in quality of education students would receive if only professors of philosophy would adopt this technique?  Submitted without more comment.