You are currently browsing the category archive for the 'Philosophy-esque' category.
The eagerly anticipated 2009 Philosophical Gourmet report has been released recently. For those who are unfamiliar, the gourmet is a ranking of anglophone philosophy departments. As usual, the rankings have been scrutinized and discussed endlessly on blogs and in real-life. But I want to examine one shortcoming that I think has not been noted:
The typeface used in the logo.
(old logo)
(new logo)
To the best of my approximation (with the help of Identifont and WhatTheFont), the old logo uses Alinea Sans Bold (see comment below) and the new logo uses Arial Narrow Bold. (The oldest logo seems to use Univers Bold.)
The question is, why the change? As anyone who lists Helvetica as one of their favorite movies on their facebook profile knows, Arial sucks. That, and the fact that the old logo was perfect serviceable, makes the change mysterious. Even on a first pass, I thought the old logo looked better. I especially liked R. So I think the Philosophical Gourmet has really taken a step back this year. Bummer!
The website for 2008 WMU Graduate Conference, December 5-7, is now up.
The conference is open to papers in all areas. Submission deadline is October 15. This year, the speakers are John Doris and John Norton. I had a very positive experience at this conference last year.
I spent the last month in Australia. First at RSSS where I did a satisfactory bit of work and enjoyed good tea time conversations. I only wish I could have stayed there longer! Then I traveled to Melbourne to attend the 2008 AAP conference.
I presented my paper on centered worlds, and an argument in the paper was met with a devastating objection from Josh Parsons and Wolfgang Schwarz. Unfortunately for me, their criticisms were right on, so that part of the paper has to go back to the drawing board and I need to do some more reading and re-reading. However, the ensuing discussions with Wo was particularly helpful in figuring out some options and also how a Lewisian might respond. In addition to that crushing blow, I also received other useful suggestions and comments from people at the conference and ANU. Let’s call it a learning experience.
Given the packed schedule, I could not even make it to every talk I wanted to go to. But the ones I did go to were all quite interesting. I was especially happy to finally learn about Stuart Brock’s experiments on the fictionality/alethic puzzle of resistance.
In non-philosophy news, I became enamored with Melbourne partially because of my newfound Aussie rules football fandom. Through some arbitrary, arational decision procedure, I am now a fan of Collingwood Magpies and enjoyed watching them come from behind and beat Adelaide at MCG. (In most domains I defer my judgment to David Lewis, but not the domain of the AFL team to support! I was told that Lewis was a lifetime Essendon supporter. Boo.)
Back to the states soon.
A space.com article reports that astronomers are on the verge of finding earth’s twin.
Pfft. Philosophers found twin earth decades ago. Take that, science.
