Wide Scope

Just a friendly reminder. The Young Philosophers Fall 2008 Lecture Series submission deadline is August 22. Spread the word to those you think might be interested.

The call for papers is here.

Welcome to the 75th Philosophers’ Carnival. Doesn’t 75 seems like a number worthy of celebration? I thought so, and so I’ve been working quickly for the last month to make sure that I would have a special treat for everyone. It’s in the bonus section at the end.

Metaphilosophy and Metaethics

1. Chris Hallquist presents What Richard Chappell is Wrong About and responds to an earlier request from Richard to have his readers to tell him what assumptions he generally makes that they disagree with. Posted at The Uncredible Hallq.
2. In Moral Experts Richard links to an article that answers the question: Who’s To Say What’s Right or Wrong? Answer: Professional philosophers, that’s who. Posted at Philosophy, et cetera.

Philosophy of Mind

1. Adam Taylor serves up a dual-dose of some interesting discussions on dualism with Spliting Up (Brains) is Hard To Do and Dualism and the Problem of Interaction - both posted at Buffalo Lake-Effect Philosophy.
2. Gualtiero Piccinini throws out a bleg and asks What’s New and Exciting About Computationalism? The excitement isn’t in the post; it’s in the comments. Posted at Brains.
3. Alrenous presents The Mind Node in an attempt to explicate a non-physical account of the mind. Posted at Accepting Ignorance.

Philosophy of Religion

1. Enigman examines an attempt to use liar-like sentences to argue against the existence of God in Liars, Divine Liars, and Semantics over at Enigmania.
2. Justin reviews Paul Davies book The Goldilocks Enigma at Panexperientialism and offers a Panexperientialist account of fine-tuning.
3. Jeremy Pierce is working on a piece for a Blackwell Series on Harry Potter and Philosophy. His post on the paper is Prophecy in Harry Potter. The paper title is “Destiny in Harry Potter”Check it out at The Prosblogion.

Political Philosophy/Applied Ethics

1. People who don’t pay taxes because they don’t want to support the military may get a bit uncomfortable after reading Joseph Orosco’s The Military-Industrial Complex and You - you may support the military in more ways than you thought. Posted at Engage: Conversations in Philosophy.
2. Thom Brooks presents offers up a critical review of a recent report called “Engaging Citizens to Fight Crime” in hopes that it can help the government fight crime in More Public Justice? Part II posted at The Brooks Blog.

Sympoze Bonus!
I started a social-bookmarking site for philosophers two weeks ago called Sympoze. We already have 50 philosophers signed up with user accounts! I thought it would be fun to post 5 of the top blog entries ranked by Sympoze users since the website launched.

1. Tips on Publishing as a Graduate Student posted at Brains.
2. Questions from a New Journal Referee posted at Leiter Reports.
3. Against (Armchair) Metaphysics posted at The Splintered Mind.
4. Experimental Philosophy on Bank Cases and Pragmatic Encroachment posted at Certain Doubts.
5. A Poor Man’s Pragmatic Encroachment posted at PEA Soup.

(Here’s a link to The Highest Ranked Posts)

About Sympoze
Sympoze is a social-bookmarking/content promotion site for philosophers. It’s is a great way for professional philosophers to share, rank, and promote online philosophy content. Here’s more information about Sympoze and how to get involved.

If you’re a professional philosophers or graduate student and you want an account just email me. Once you have an account, submitting and voting is easy.

The End
That’s it for the carnival. Thanks for reading. The next Philosophers’ Carnival will be hosted at Think It Over.

Congratulations
Congratulations to Joshua Thurow. A longer version of the paper that he presented in our Young Philosophers Lecture Series was just accepted for publication in Philosophical Studies! Well done, Joshua!

Fall 2008 Call for Papers Update
The original deadline for submission to the Fall 2008 Young Philosophers Lecture Series was August 15th. We’re going to extend it to August 22nd. That way this reminder gives you plenty of time to put the finishing touches that paper you’ve been polishing all summer. Check out the Call for Papers here. Spread the word to young philosophers who might be interested.

I went on a Fox News rant a while back. Here’s more fuel.

From the webcomic XKCD

In an earlier post (How Long Is The Present?) we had a little warm-up exercise. I assumed that presentism must hold that the only time that exists is a durationless present moment. I also tried to motivate it with two arguments. Let’s just take that assumption for granted in this post. Presentism must hold that the present is a durationless instantaneous moment and no other moments exist.

Puzzle One: Referring to the Present Moment with “Now”
Consider the utterance of the word “now”. If eternalism is true, then “now” refers to the time of utterance, and eternalism seems to have enough in the toolkit to be the referent of “now”. One candidate for the referent is the the entire range of time it takes to utter “now”.

It’s a little difficult for me to see what the referent of ‘now’ could be if presentism is true and present moments are durationless. I doubt it is what the presentist could plausibly countenance as the present moment. It can’t be the entire range of time that it takes to utter the word “now” -
ranges of time are not present moments for the presentist (if the assumption in the previous paragraph is correct).

I suppose the presentist could hold that it’s the first moment at which the speaker begins the event of uttering the word “now” - But I’m not sure that’s true. At least, in some cases where I utter “now” I’m not trying to pick out that moment. I’m trying my best to pick out some range of
moments that occur during the utterance.

Furthermore, suppose I utter “Now, I am speaking” - If ‘now’ denotes the first moment at which I start to utter ‘now’, then what I utter is false - because ‘I am speaking’ is present tense and by the time I utter those words the first moment of the utterance of ‘now’ is past.

Some presentists maintain that you can refer to things that do not exist and say true things about them. Call this non-serious presentism. The non-serious presentist might hold that ‘now’ does refer to the entire range of time at which ‘now’ is uttered (just like the eternalist might) because non-serious presentism allows for reference to non-existing times.

A problem for this view is that ‘now’ doesn’t really pick out the present. Eternalism still comes out OK because ‘now’ functions indexically. Which brings me to a related concern.

Puzzle Two: “Now” has never been uttered in the present.
If presentism is true, then no one in the history of the world has ever uttered the word “now” in any present moment. Assuming that it takes some amount of time to utter the word ‘now’ - then no one has ever completely uttered the word ‘now’ in the present. That’s a little odd considering that we typically take it for granted that the present moment is precisely when the word ‘now’ gets uttered.

Puzzle Three: Gunky Time
Here’s a third puzzle. This one has less to do with the referent of ‘now’ and more to do with the presentist commitment to durationless moments of time.

One might think that it is metaphysically possible for time to be gunky in a way that is analogous to the way that metaphysicians appeal to the possibility of gunky matter and gunky space. That is, it seems metaphysically possible that there no smallest unit of time (for any unit of time, you can always split that unit into two other units).

Now let’s go a step further. If you’re on board with the possibility that time can always be split, then you might also be on board with another possibility - namely that time does not have durationless moments. At a minimum, this is epistemically possible. For all I know there are no durationless moments.

If it’s metaphysically possible for time to lack durationless moments, then it is metaphysically possible that presentism is false in worlds where time passes. If presentism is supposed to be a necessary truth about the nature of existing things in worlds where time passes, then presentism is false.

——————-
So those are my half-baked puzzles. Nothing devastating as far as I can tell, but they seem like they’re worth thinking about to me.

I’ll be hosting the next Philosophers’ Carnival on August 11th. Here’s the online submission form. I really enjoy posts that have a nice, clear analytic style. But I’m open to any kind of submission.

I look forward to reading all of your submissions.

It was originally set up so that anytime a user submitted it was automatically promoted to the front page.

Now I’ve set it up (I think) so that a submitted story is placed in the “Upcoming Tab” - It doesn’t get promoted to the front page in its section unless at least one other user votes it up.

If this seems like a bad change let me know.

I have some half-baked puzzles for presentism, but before I lay those out - I have a quick warm-up exercise.

How Long Is the Present?
I assume that if presentism is true, then the answer is durationless. This seems like a fair assumption. However, I vaguely remember someone describing a version of presentism according to which the present moment had duration.

So maybe I shouldn’t simply assume that presentism is committed to durationless present moments. Instead, I can offer two arguments that the present must be durationless, if presentism is true. However, I’m not sure how good they are.

Argument One: If the present moment had duration and presentism is true, then there is a time at which past things and future things both exist - namely, the beginning of the present moment and the end of the present moment. But this seems like what I’ll call micro-eternalism. I can’t see how the presentist could plausibly resist the push to full blown eternalism.

Argument Two: Duration entails a past and a future. If presentism is true, then it cannot be true that two things exist at the same time such that one is past and the other is future. A moment with duration that wholly exists at one time, entails that there are two things that both exist such that one is past and one is future. Therefore, if presentism is true, then present moments cannot have duration.

I don’t know that I can really make either of those stick, and I probably should go back sometime and present these in numbered-premise form. I simply wanted to get these down.

Warm-up is over - I’ll present the puzzles I have for presentism after I mull this over.