Black Friday

So I’m one of those nincompoops who woke up at 430am yesterday morning to partake of the shopping frenzy known as “Black Friday.” Nothing catastrophic occurred – though I did bring a baseball bat and brass knuckles just in case that Mom of four wanted to challenge me for the latest “Tickle-me Elmo” gadget I [...]

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Dare I say this on blogger.com…

For the past few weeks, I’ve been dealing with the winding-down of the semester. The “winding-down” I speak of includes creating final exams, assuring students of their status in my class (i.e., passing/failing), and preparing for next semester’s classes. On top of all this, there’s my dissertation which I need to finish soon – very [...]

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Tidying up

I’ve noticed that I’ve got a few posts lingering in draft form. I’d like to get those out to the public domain before the end of the week. These posts should appear very soon.
I expect that blogging will be light around Thanksgiving, so this post is just forewarning for interested readers. Have a great Thanksgiving!

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Distinguishing between one’s own actions

Suppose that the coarse-grained account, i.e., the Anscombe-Davidson line, of action individuation is correct. On this account, all actions are bodily movements. The description of bodily movements corefer. So, for every action description, each perfect nominal denotes the same action. For example, “Smith’s arm movements,” “Smith’s pump operation,” “Smith’s replenishment of the water supply,” and [...]

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The Leiter Philosophical Gourmet Report and Job Placement: An Attempt (albeit a sorry one) to Defend the Report

The 2006-2008 Philosophical Gourmet Report (“PGR”) is now posted. One can access it by clicking here.
I have been somewhat critical of the PGR in the past, but I’ve learned that it’s not the best idea to be critical of something as ubiquitous as the PGR. When so many people agree that it’s something worthwhile for [...]

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Austin on Individuation (Take Two)

As far as I see it, the primary focus of Austin’s work is exposing a problem in the way some other philosophers have assumed that descriptions correspond to a state-of-affairs or events. His discussion of various speech acts and whether they designate facts or reactions to behavior (behabitives), etc. is a critique.
In “The Happy Truth: [...]

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Austin on Individuation (Take One)

I had a chance this weekend to revisit Austin’s How to Do Things with Words. The book has had its share of interpreters, most notably John Searle. What I find suspect is the way some interpreters have thought the book is about classifying speech acts. From what Austin says on p. 12, one would think [...]

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pahking the kah…

This result doesn’t surprise me in the least.

What American accent do you have?
Your Result: Boston

You definitely have a Boston accent, even if you think you don’t. Of course, that doesn’t mean you are from the Boston area, you may also be from New Hampshire or Maine.

North Central

The West

The Midland

Philadelphia

The Northeast

The Inland North

The South

What American accent [...]

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Consciousness, Conscious, Zombie, Zombies, Personal Identity and Self Identity (oh yeah and Chalmers too)

Trent Dougherty, of Counsel of Trent and This is the Name of this Blog, pointed to a new feature in Google. It’s known as Google Trends.
If I’m understanding Google correctly (and I could be wrong b/c the language on the web site isn’t very clear), Google Trends analyzes the search term (or terms, up to [...]

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Anti-psychologism and Action Theory

Practical reasoning is figuring out what to do. To do is to act. Therefore, the pattern of practical inferences can be read off of actions.
On some accounts, an action is an action because it is directed at a goal. The goal-directedness of an action is derived from one being in an appropriate psychological state, e.g., [...]

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