Richard Brown

Fantasy Philosophy Department

By

Richard Brown
1–2 minutes

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I was thinking about fantasy baseball today after watching Knocked up. I am not much of a sports fan so I started thinking about a philosphy version of this stuff. So, let’s say you were the chair of your won philosophy department. What would your fantasy department look like? Let’s say that you only get 10 faculty. My picks would be as follows

1. Kent Bach

2. David Rosenthal

3. Austen Clark

4. Stephen Neale

5. Michael Devitt

6. Bill Lycan

7. Stephan Darwall

8. Ned Block

9.  John Searle

10. Ruth Millikan

I guess we need some rules to, like points for books published and conference presentations…what would be your picks?

Comments

9 responses to “Fantasy Philosophy Department”

  1. Brandon Avatar
    Brandon

    Wow, I would strangle myself in your fantasy department; the history program is really, really awful, given that only Darwall prevents it from being a total collapse — and he has to do double-duty for history and ethics both.

    I have to go now, but I’ll try to remember to put up mine when I next have the chance.

    Reply
  2. Brandon Avatar
    Brandon

    And it’s up, because I just had to do it anyway.

    Reply
  3. Richard Brown Avatar
    Richard Brown

    🙂 yeah, my department is consciousness centered…though Rosenthal does some history…and I see I am already not following the rules, since I have two poeple from the department that I am getting my PhD from…should we really have that rule, if so I have got to make some changes…

    Reply
  4. Brandon Avatar
    Brandon

    I don’t think it’s necessary; I just did it to make things easier to choose.

    Reply
  5. jmcd Avatar
    jmcd

    i liked your idea, but fantasy baseball (i’m a huge fan…) works on statistics. so, we would have to begin there. and, it seems that in the philmindlanguage category, your department would score high, but otherwise would be far below the mendoza line. maybe we could develop some statistical categories that were parallel between baseball and philosophy. HRs = published books? RBIs = advised dissertations that produced tenure track hires? ERA = unsuccessful replies to fundamental objections? good idea, RBrown.

    Reply
  6. Richard Brown Avatar
    Richard Brown

    Yo jmcd, that’s R. W. H. Brown to you! 🙂

    But good, I am glad we got someone who knows how fantasy baseball works interested to help work out some details!

    Uh, what a ‘mendoza line’ is that a statistical concept I don’t know about?

    I like your categories but I don’t really know what and ERA is…is that ‘earned run average’? But following your general line of thought we would have something like;

    Home Runs=published books with major presses (OUP, MIT, Oxford, etc)

    RBI=advised dissertation of someone who gets a (top 20?) tenure track job

    Base Hit=Invited talk or keynote address (with prestige of invitation correlating to single, double, triple…so being invited to give the Locke lectures at Oxford is a triple, being invited to do a Author meets critic at the apa a double, etc)

    So those are your batter-like stats, but we also need defenive play-like states as well, right? Like, double plays, and errors, etc. Perhaps something like

    An out=fundamental objection to some position (e.g. Quine’s arg. against the analytic/synthetic, or Block and Fodor’s arg’s in Trouble with Functionalism).

    A pop-fly is a question begging argument

    How do these stats get assigned points?

    Should we have Fantasy conferences where our departments compete?

    Have you put up your Fantasy department yet? If so put a link to here so we can all compare!!

    Reply
  7. Billie Pritchett Avatar
    Billie Pritchett

    Is there an online index of living philosophers and the fields in which they work?

    Reply
  8. Richard Brown Avatar
    Richard Brown

    I don’t know if there is…I think the closest thing would be something like Brian Leiter’s list of Faculty in Top 50 philosophy depatments…or his Phil Gourmet specialty site and then go to the depatment…

    Reply
  9. Fantasy Philosophy Department (again) « Philosophy Sucks! Avatar
    Fantasy Philosophy Department (again) « Philosophy Sucks!

    […] a little interest in Fantasy Philosophy Department so I put a page up for it in the side bar (the original post is still up as well). Feel free to join in and you want to play a game then help me develop some […]

    Reply

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