Update and Some Cool Stuff

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I'd like to apologise to all my regular readers for my lengthy absence from blogging. Unfortunately, the past month and half has been a time of considerable upheaval for me. I'm moving house in order to start a new job in September, and I'm preparing for my final assessment on my PhD. I'm expecting to get back to some sort of regular posting in September once this is over.

In the meantime, and to keep you all busy, you should check out the following philosophy papers. I thought they were pretty cool and some may even be groundbreaking.


1. "A Counterexample to the Contrastive Account of Knowledge" by Jason Rourke
This article is all about the difference between what we might traditional accounts of knowledge and contrastive accounts. A traditional account of knowledge would maintain that knowledge is best understood as a relation between a subject (S) and a proposition (P), such that S knows P. Contrastive accounts of knowledge maintain that knowledge is best understood as a relation between a subject (S) and two propositions (P and Q), such that S knows P rather than Q. Contrastive accounts of knowledge have always seemed appealing to me, but in this article Rourke presents a counterexample to the account.


2. "An Impossibility Theorem for Amalgamating Evidence" by Jacob Stegenga
I have to say I'm incredibly excited (and slightly disconcerted) by this article. It suggests that amalgamating evidence from different sources when trying to assess a single overall hypothesis is impossible, in much the same way that amalgamating individual preferences into a social preference ordering is impossible. In other words, this article could do for the philosophy of evidence what Arrow's impossibility theorem did for political philosophy.


3. "The Armchair and the Trolley: An Argument for Experimental Ethics" by Guy Kahane
I haven't much to say about this one. Kahane seems to have been churning out consistently interesting philosophical papers on a diverse range of topics over the past year or so (I covered one of them before here) and this is just another one to add to that collection. In it, he argues that even avowed moral intuitionists have reason to sit-up and pay attention to what's going on in experimental ethics.


4. "Compatibilism and Moral Claimancy: An Intermediate Path to Appropriate Blame" by Seth Shabo
This paper looks at the type of moral responsibility that survives the rejection of libertarian free will and hard determinism.  It's probably the best paper I've ever read on the topic - and I've read quite a few at this stage. Shabo has another good one on the "Mind argument" against libertarian free will. It'd be worth taking a gander at that one too, if you get a chance.


That's all for now. Check back in September.

New Paper on Kantian Constructivism

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Gosh it's been longer than I expected. After an unacceptably long delay, I will complete the series on Fischer and Frankfurt cases this week. Apologies to all those who have been waiting for part two. Anyway in the meantime I thought I'd recommend this new article on Kantian Constructivism. This covers some of the ideas in moral philosophy that I have been dealing with on this blog. I haven't read it all yet, but it looks interesting.

"Is Kant a Moral Constructivist or a Moral Realist?" by Peter Formosa

Interruption to "Normal" Services

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So after a flurry of blogging activity in the past week, I regret to inform you all that I will be on a blogging hiatus for the next three weeks. This is partly due to the need to take some sort of summer holiday and partly due to the need to focus on my own research work.

On the plus side, I have a couple of podcasts recorded and I will schedule them for appearance over the coming week.

You can still post comments of course, and I may even respond to some of them, but don't expect any substantive posts until September.

Over and out.

JD

P.S. - I think I would like to grow the readership of this blog. I currently only get about 50 people per day, which is a small drop in the large ocean of internet-users. Obviously, I need to do some work of my own to promote. But if you like what you read here, it would be nice if you could share it or link to it on other blogs and forums that you frequent. I know that a number of readers already do that and I would like to take this opportunity to thank them for it.

Update

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To all my readers,

Sorry for the lack of posts. Got a backlog of work to contend with at the moment. Probably won't have any new stuff til next week.

In the meantime, I suggest browsing the back catalogue.

Expanding my Repertoire

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I've decided to expand the purview of this blog somewhat. To justify taking the time out to write it, I need to include more of the material that I actually research.

So you can expect more posts on topics in the philosophy and psychology of normative behaviour, causation and game theory. This will also include some material on the psychology of religion. If that interests you, stay tuned.

Update

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Don't worry, I haven't abandoned this blog. I'm exceptionally busy at the moment trying to write my PhD thesis. I'll have to be more modest in my posting schedule over the next few months. But I will still try to get stuff up a couple of times a week.

Also, I appear to be getting constant hits from the same google images search (unknown browser, unknown location). I have removed the image, but it hasn't stopped the constant hits. Does anybody who is more knowledgeable than I know how to stop this, or whether I should even care?

In case you were wondering...

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Just to let you know, I'll be away for the next week. Alas, that means no new stuff til next friday.