Arbitrary Marks

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

To create a massive brain. Functionalists of the world, be afraid. Be very afraid.

Send post as PDF to

While reading Paul Williams’ article “Some Aspects of Language and Construction in Madhyamaka” (an older one, taken from his D.Phil. thesis), I ran across this quote:
Nevertheless the fact that the Madhyamaka position seems paradoxical cannot be doubted, the interesting point being that for the Madhyamaka the Vijñānavāda position was paradoxical and vice-versa. Mutual incomprehensibility and [...]

It’s lunch break during day two of the UT Austin Methodology conference and I’m trying to find some organized way to reflect on the topics that have been presented. They’re at varying levels of meta-ness, and intertwined in ways that make it tricky to see where to grab the thread to untangle the knot.
One topic [...]

This morning is the start of the Methodology Conference at UT Austin and Roy Sorenson from Washington University in St. Louis is presenting on “Internestingness.” So far, it’s been a, well, interesting, conversation about not only interesting numbers, but what it is to do philosophy, social facts about what we value in philosophers (truth or [...]

Arbitrary Marks is currently relocating to Austin, TX and during that time, posting will be (even more) irregular. I don’t have Internet in my apartment set up ahead of time, so once I arrive, I’ll be posting from coffee shops. The UT Austin Methodology Conference will also be taking up most of my time.
Readers in [...]

Now that I have the schedule for the Methodology Conference, I can direct my reading more carefully (no sense in reading Saturday’s articles first, then scrambling to prep for Tuesday’s workshop).
The first day includes Roy Sorenson and Josh Dever, and I’m taking a break from packing for Austin to read Sorenson’s paper on interestingness.* One [...]