Arbitrary Marks

Blog silence will continue until my Sanskrit midterm is over. Anyone with ways to cram grammatical patterns into your head (and overcome test anxiety), let me know…

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This was going to be an aside, but then I read Jane Smiley’s review in The Nation and had to make it a full post.  Franky Schaeffer, son of Francis and Edith Schaeffer, has written a book about his experiences entitled Crazy For God. 
The full subtitle is “How I Grew Up as One of the [...]

David Chalmers has compiled his bibliography of consciousness studies into a nifty search engine called MindPapers.

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What if there existed a perfectly loving god? What would that entail with respect to 1) what such a god would value and 2) our epistemic access to this god’s existence?

This question is not my own, but that of my philosophy of religion professor, Paul Moser. He reminds me of a seminary professor I had, Michael Williams. I would bet that the two disagree on some important confessional matters, namely, the inerrancy and historicity of the biblical texts. However, they have two shared mantras: “god is not god’s name” and “why assume god is a foundationalist?”

This lecture sounds interesting and is pertinent to my current paper topic.  While philosophical thought experiments are sometimes far outside of the realm of human experience, let’s not forget that reality presents us with difficult “thought experiments”, too–ones with dramatic implications.
Dr. Christine Overall
Queen’s University
“Conjoined Twins, Embodied Personhood, and Surgical Separation”
Thursday, November 1st 2007
3:30-5:30 p.m.
Galvin Auditorium, [...]

I’m curious what your intuitions are about the following scenarios. Where would you be, if these stories happened? (And by “you”, I mean whatever you tend to mean when you say “I”–nothing more or less).

I’m updating the Arbitrary Marks blog to a cleaner format, so there are a few links that aren’t yet functional. The theme is called “Morning After” and is modeled after an online magazine style. It only took a few minutes to install and looks easily customizeable (I’ll be changing the header graphics, too).

Leave any comments about wonky stuff here, so I can be sure to fix it as I go. I’m a little overwhelmed with projects at the moment, so robust new content will have to continue to be on hold for another few days.

On Friday I traveled down to Saint Louis University to participate in my first graduate student conference, on Mind and Metaphysics. Tim O’Connor was the keynote speaker, but I missed his talk because I was still en route from Chicago. The Pious Zombie paper went over like, well, a pious zombie might–without much excitement. I [...]

Half of the fun in philosophy is coming up with catchy names for your views. My zombie paper reviewer, Alex Arnold of Notre Dame, helped me out in that regard, calling my thesis the “Pious Zombie” view. I dig that. He had a few criticisms of my main argument, which I anticipated, [...]

I’m about halfway through a semester of teaching logic online with a program called D2L (Desire to Learn) and Hurley’s Concise Introduction to Logic (9th edition).  I don’t have any complaints about the platform, and in fact, I find it more flexible than Blackboard, which is what I’d used at other schools.  What I do [...]