* John Wilkins and a few others are starting up an HPS (history and philosophy of science) blog called Whewell's Ghost. The idea is to provide a sort of central point for HPS posts in the blogosphere that have at least some real research behind them. It's already looking great. I'll be occasionally contributing some things. I don't do HPS so much as history of HPS, and that on some fairly narrow subjects as it is, so I don't expect to be contributing a huge amount, but I certainly will post some things on early modern HPS (especially on Hume and on the impact of Newtonianism on philosophy), Whewell, and Duhem here and there. Over the next month or two I'll probably go back into the archives and rework some posts I've already done, repost them here and post the ledes over there; and a few I might post there and just provide a link here.
As an example of the treats we're in for, Thony C discusses William Whewell.
* A very good discussion of Apfelbaum's analysis of tokenism at "Feminist Philosophers"
* A website devoted to the increasingly visible phenomenon of Sufi rock, which is spearheaded by the Pakistani musician, Salman Ahmad, and his rock band Junoon. They have music samples; some of it is pretty catchy. Ahmad was recently in the news talking about his "rock-n-roll jihad" against Islamic extremism.
* Henry Karlson tells the Jain morality tale of Siddhi and Buddhi. I'd heard it before, although I don't think I'd realized it was Jain in origin.
* A nice series of pages on Godel's ontological argument, by Christopher Small. He also has a paper with some reflections on the argument (PDF) that's interesting to read.
* A blog devoted to the best shows from Escape and Suspense, two of classic radio's best radio programs.
And another for Radio Detective Story Hour. It would be nice to find one for Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar.
* James Chastek has an excellent post on arguments from evil.
* Andrew Preslar discusses J. R. R. Tolkien's Sacramental World:
Part One: Memory
Part Two: Matter
Part Three: Language
(Part Two is delayed but will be along eventually.)
* Some notable people in the UK protest the Pope's visit. What I find remarkable is how weak the case is. I don't know what the segregated education issue is supposed to be (and googling around, apparently no one outside of Britain does, either). But as for the rest, we have one issue (abortion) that the Pope opposes because he thinks it violates human rights, one issue (sex abuse) that the Pope is on record agreeing with and has been doing something about, one issue (contraception) with indirect negative effects, some vague statements about Vatican concordats and human rights, and an issue (gay marriage) that the Pope shares with probably at least a quarter of the heads of state in the world, if not more, and is the sort of thing that heads of state are expected to discuss by means of state visits anyway. I'm a little disappointed, I confess: purely off the top of my head I can come up with a longer and harsher list of reasons why the UK shouldn't give Obama "the honour of a state visit" and it's blatantly obvious that even that list wouldn't be adequate in itself for denial of a state visit. The only argument I've seen that makes any sense toward this end is based on a sort of neutrality thesis: that British taxpayers should not be funding an opportunity for the Pope to advocate Catholic ideas; although it's somewhat less substantive an argument in a nation with an established church.
I'd say something about the recent hubbub about the Pope's comments on Nazis and atheist extremists, but the outrage is so obviously manufactured that it seems pointless to bother. Atheists are perfectly capable when it suits them of recognizing that 'atheism' is not a monolithic block term, and that therefore criticism or support of one group does not extend to everyone who takes the label; and if they weren't it would be a sign of a serious intellectual problem. The choice not to recognize that in this case, even if while still remaining critical on other grounds, is a transparently deliberate and purely rhetorical one. In any case, while I wouldn't say everything exactly the same way, the Suburban Banshee has good post on the subject for those who are interested.
* A cognitive science study being used to argue that "ontological confusions are defining properties of superstitions, magical, and paranormal beliefs". Like a lot of studies it doesn't tell us much that we didn't already know; and like a lot of studies of this sort it fails to be sufficiently precise. Folk categories are purely pragmatic categories, not clearly ontological ones: we sharply distinguish persons from artifacts, for instance, because it's useful for most ordinary purposes to do so, not because we have in hand a stunning refutation of the possibility of artificial intelligence. And thus the definition given is consistent with some superstitious beliefs being true: Given how the folk categories are established in cognitive science in the first place, there is nothing particularly problematic about holding that there really are unusual cases where the boundaries of them are violated, because there's nothing sacrosanct about those boundaries. They were not engraved on our minds by the hand of God; there is no guarantee that they perfectly carve nature at its joints. The study's interesting, though, because it argues (and this seems to have been overlooked by most of the skeptical sites linking to it) that superstition is not really due to a failure of rationality or excessive emotionalism, but primarily to a greater tendency to think that our folk distinctions are not absolute or exceptionless but are themselves a byproduct of an underlying set of connections among the categories.
* Some papers I'm currently reading or in the process of getting to:
Toby Ord, Hypercomputation
Kevin Kelly, How to Do Things With an Infinite Regress (PDF)
Kevin Kelly, Efficient Convergence Implies Ockham's Razor (PDF)
Kevin Kelly, Learning Theory and Epistemology (PDF)
Kelly & Mayo-Wilson, Ockham Efficiency Theorem for Random Empirical Methods (PDF)
Kevin Kelly, Learning, Simplicity, Truth, and Misinformation (PDF)
Kevin Kelly, Argument, Inquiry, and the Unity of Science (PDF)
George Lavers, Benacerraf's Dilemma and Informal Mathematics (PDF)
* Kenny Pearce continues blogging through Sobel's Logic and Theism:
Modal Collapse: Sobel's Objection to Gödel's Ontological Argument
Would a Being with All Positive Properties be God?
What is Supposed to be Proved in Aquinas's Five Ways?
A Leibnizian Cosmological Argument
* Hilariously funny, or at least I thought so:
