I have been having problems with my internet connection at home and so I may be light n the posting and responding to comments until I get this issue resolved…please bear with me.
Misc BS
A Random Thought about the Oscars
So, I was watching the Oscars last night and I was struck by the fact that there is a separate prize for best actor and best actress (in both lead and supporting categories). It seems to me that there is no reason to have separate awards for these, I mean we do not have separate racial awards (best Black actor, best Hispanic actor, etc), nor do they have seperate awards based on sexual preference (best gay actor, best straight actor). So why on Earth should they have seperate actor/actress awards? It seems to me that they should drop ‘actress’ altogether and group everyone under ‘actor’. That way men and women would compete for ‘best actor’.
New Philosophers’ Carnival
is here
The philo-gangsta rap is funny…but don’t forget about my my philo-yo mama jokes!!!
62nd Philosophers’ Carnival
The Semester Begins
So the semester is starting up at the Graduate Center again (though not at LaGuardia, which though a CUNY school, is on a different schedule. Our semester starts March 1st…don’t ask). If everything goes according to plan this will technically be my last semester of graduate school! That is a very exciting prospect…though I am just begining to see how difficult it is to coordinate all of the people involved…I hope to defend in the first two weeks of September and I can see already that though it is nine months away it will br a challenge to get everyone that needs to be there there…not to mention finishing the actual dissertation and defending it!!!
The Colloquium series looks very interesting. I may go and check out Brandom’s talk talk tomorrow…though I am not sure…if anyone is interested the paper that the talk is based on is posted at the GC site I linked to above. These talks are open to the public and anyone who is the NYC area should come down, there is usually quite a turn out!
Also interesting is Kripke’s class on philosophy of mathematics. It lookslike he will be talking about Quine’s indispensability argument which claims that mathematics is only interesting because it is useful (indispensable) to science and so its justification is ultimately empirical. There is a lot of support for that thesis at the GC (Rosenthal and Devitt spring to mind) and so it would be interesting to hear Kripke’s arguments on it. I may sit in on it here and there and if I do I will post some stuff about it. Sadly I will not be able to sit in on all of the other really interesting classes they are offering (like Devitt’s animal cognition one, or Armstrong’s ’empiricists metaphysics’ one…)
Finally I want to also remind you of the CUNY CogSci symposium. The first talk is as follows
February 1: Michela Tacca
Philosophy and Social Sciences, Università di Siena
“The Structure of Vision: Systematicity of Visual Feature Binding”
All talks are Fridays 1-3 at the Graduate Center…drinks afterwards!!
And Another One…
Some of you may know about my penchant for writing utterly ridiculous philo-gangsta rap tunes…some of you may even have heard that I have been working on a new one on Descartes…well, it’s finally here! Go and check it out, if you dare…
In my previous attempts I have written the music myself and I was doing the same for this one, but then I realized that I had all of these Logical Form instrumentals lying around…Sorry guys 🙂
Music is Good
Ever wonder what I do what I am not teaching, writing, grading, or flitting about pedaling my philosophical wares? Mostly I like to play the drums…no, not in Rock Band; actual drums! 🙂 Anyways, I just updated some music stuff and so I thought I would share…
For a while I was playing with a group of NYC area philosophers called The Neural Correletes of David Chalmers, or NC/DC and The Devestating Objections as we were known when we had more than 5 guitarists!! Sadly, people graduated, got jobs, and NC/DC seems to have gone the way of the dinosour…It is immortalized in its myspace page…though there may be a possible NC/DC reunion in Tucson in April… or at least there is one is a close possible world 🙂
Lately I have been playing with a couple of NC/DC vets and Graduate Center cohorts going by the name of Logical Form or The CUNY Philoso-Funk All-Stars or some such; whatever you call it, we have been making some funky music! Check it out here (and strangely also here) and at my personal myspace page (disregard the pics of me from back when I was in college…:) ). Please keep in mind, these were all recorded in Dan’s living room without rehersal…hopefully more to come!!!!
To 10 Posts of 2007
–Runner-Up– Reason and The Nature of Obligation
10. Does God Know about Quantuum Mechanics?
9. Bah Humbug!
8. Priming, Change Blindness, and the Function of Consciousness
Top 10 Least Popular Posts of 2007
–Runner-Up– That’s Not an Argument
10. Truth, Justification, and the Quasi-Realist Way
9. Consciousness, Relational Properties, and Higher-Order Theories
8. 09/19/07 –Devitt on Meaning
7. Back to the Grind and Meta-Metaethics
6. Kripke, Consciousness, and the ‘Corn
5. HOT Fun in the Summertime I
OK, OK! I’ll go grade papers now!!! 😉
61st Philosophers’ Carnival
Celebrate MLK jr. day by wasting time on line! This issue of the carnival looks especially interesting
New Philosophers’ Carnival
is HERE
Richard Brown 