Arbitrary Marks

It’s Sunday afternoon, I’m at Dolce Vita in Austin reading the Sunday Times, and it’s the day for my first weekly link roundup. Most, but not all, of the links I’ll feature here are on my del.ico.us account. Later on in the week, I hope to post some discussion of what I’ve been reading–mostly [...]

Click on the image to go to my Flickr photostream and view larger.
This post is part of a new series, Friday images, in which I post a photograph I’ve taken during the week which may or may not have philosphical relevance.

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And now, for something completely different:

Mondays: Arbitrary culture
Wednesdays: Philosophy text of the week
Fridays: Image of the week
Sundays: Link roundup

Mondays I’ll try to post something related to politics, religion or gender, several topics that recur here frequently. On Wednesdays I’ll post a passage from a paper or book I’ve read, perhaps with a bit of commentary [...]

Here’s what I’ll be working on this semester:

Wittgenstein and Kripke with John Deigh
A first year seminar (covering topics like philosophy of language and mind) with Adam Pautz
Indian Philosophy with Stephen Phillips
Sanskrit with Harzer Edeltraud
Grader for Jeff Leon’s Medical Ethics undergraduate section

If I have any free time (ha!) I may try to do some reading with [...]

As the school year starts (in two days), I’ve been reading a few books and articles on the subject of Indian philosophy as well as India in general. The first book is Jonardon Ganeri’s Philosophy in Classical India, which is an overview of some of the major strands of thought, with a particular focus on [...]

Welcome, Freshmen. Have an iPod. - NYTimes.com
"She speculated that professors might try harder to make classes interesting if they were competing with the devices" - because they're not already working hard enough.
(tags: education)

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The Misshapen Mind: How the Brain's Haphazard Evolution Left Us with Self-Destructive Instincts | | AlterNet
Book reviews of two n ew works on evo-psych.
(tags: books)

Does air conditioning make people vote Republican? (Salon Life)
Could explain Texas?
(tags: news.articles)

Buddhism and Homosexuality (Buddhist Channel)
Editorial by Ven Shravasti Dhammika
(tags: buddhism.popculture)

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Grade Inflation — Crooked Timber
Book review and discussion of grade inflation's existence.
(tags: education)

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The photographs I took throughout the conference are at my Flickr set, here. I took sparingly few, compared to most events I photograph, in part because I was giving my attention to the content rather than framing it aesthetically. Further, my Alpha 100 has a very loud shutter click, and I really didn’t want [...]

One of the questions that’s baffled me (quietly) during my time studying analytic philosophy is why so many otherwise sane individuals seem to think abstract objects exist. During the past week, I’ve heard more people say “Well, I don’t know what x is”, or “I don’t know what you mean by x”, so I’ll just [...]