January 3, 2009 – 3:39 pm
There have been a litany of complaints about the organization of American Philosophical Association (APA) since the close of the Eastern APA. I thought I’d gather them here.
- Philosophers Anonymous has several complaints here and here
- Leiter posted a complaint by David Velleman here. That thread is still generating interesting discussion.
- The Philosophy Smoker has seven suggestions for the APA here.
I won’t weigh in on all of the comments and concerns here, but I will note that one of the more fruitful suggestions comes from Gregory Wheeler in the comment thread on the Leiter post. Here’s what he said. Read More »
January 3, 2009 – 1:19 am
December 19, 2008 – 1:15 pm
[UPDATE: An alternative method explained at bottom of post.]
A lot of us are furiously crunching numbers into Spreadsheets, but then we’ll have to convert those final grade percentages to letter grades.
Here are some formulas you can use to automatically generate a Final Letter Grade from your students Final Grade Percentage. Even if you can do the conversion quickly in your head, this method is probably much quicker and it reduces the likelihood of human error.
It’s VERY simple. Happy Grading and Happy Holidays!
Instructions
- Tally up your students’ final grade percentage (on a 100 point scale).
- Copy one of the functions below.
- Paste the code in the cell where you want the first student’s letter grade to appear.
- Important: Make sure you change all occurences of ‘A1′ in the function to the cell ID where the first student’s Final Grade Percentage is located.
- Fill the Formula Down the Column
(If you’re using a Spread Sheet Program - I’m assuming you know how to do this part.)
Standard Scale
Formula
=IF(A1>93,”A”,IF(A1>89,”A-”,IF(A1>86,”B+”,IF(A1>82,”B”,IF(A1>79,”B-”,IF(A1>76,”C+”,IF(A1>72,”C”,IF(A1>69,”C-”,IF(A1>66,”D+”,IF(A1>62,”D”,IF(A1>59,”D-”,”F”)))))))))))
Grade Scale
A = 94-100
A– = 90-93
B+ = 87-89
B = 83-86
B- = 80-82
C+ = 77-79
C = 73-76
C- = 70-72
D+ = 67-69
D = 63-66
D- = 60-62
F = 59 – below Read More »
December 19, 2008 – 2:05 am
You know why Lewis Powell is awesome? He loves thinking about Frege’s Puzzle.
You know why Lewis Powell is even awesomer? He loves thinking about Frege’s Puzzle this much.
December 18, 2008 – 3:04 pm
I finally finished making some stylistic changes to “Moral Perception”. It’s forthcoming in the European Journal of Philosophy.
I posted this recent version of it on my Research Page, but you can also click here.
December 16, 2008 – 12:19 pm
A while back, I argued that we philosophers ought to shift our practices so that all of our research was published in open access mediums.
I then suggested several strategies for what the discipline needed to do.
One of the suggestions was that the editorial staff should simple migrate the journal into an open access forum. I noted that this would be particularly easy if the editorial board had the authority to switch publishing venues without penalty from the current publisher.
So, it looks like Analysis has that sort of migration authority, and they are leaving Blackwell. But they they are switching to Oxford University Press!
No! This would have been the perfect opportunity to free one of philosophy’s top journals from the clutches of proprietary publishing. If Analysis had the freedom to move, why not go open access?
In fairness to OUP and Analysis, as far as proprietary publishers go OUP isn’t so bad. I’m told they divert a sizeable chunk of earnings back into academia. They are also in the habit of offering several months of free access to all of their journals.
But still - can you imagine how great it would be if everyone had free online access to Analysis?
December 16, 2008 – 12:53 am
John Basl has compiled a list of Philosophers using Twitter. This list keeps growing, and I just wanted to help John spread the word. If you don’t know what Twitter is check out his follow up post here. In that second post he discusses the issue - Why would a philosopher want a Twitter account?
I want to pick up there. I agree that it’s not a must have technology, but it’s suprisingly useful and not a total time waster.
Here are 11 things that, as a professional philosopher, I have found useful about Twitter.
1. Get in Touch
The primary benefit of Twitter for philosophers is that it a good means to put philosophers in touch with other philosophers.
2. Staying In Touch
Let’s be honest. How bad are you at staying in touch with friends or colleagues you’ve met at a conference over email? I’m awful at this. Twittering, however, makes this easy. With all the different ways to update Twitter at your disposal (email, Firefox plugin, text message, desktop applications), and the 140 character limit - It takes 2 seconds to post a quick status update. Over a week or a month - these add up and you get a nice snapshot of what you’ve been up to. Two people following each other on Twitter - do stay current with one another without much effort for either party.
3. Professional Help
Following philosophers on Twitter isn’t just about learning that they had some yummy eggs for breakfast. Twitter has actually helped professionally. For example, Basl has been a huge help with Sympoze. As he notes - our contact and most of our interaction is through Twitter.
With regards to research, I usually tweet the topic or title of the paper I’m currently working on. I usually get at least one response from another philosopher interested in the paper. In the six months that I’ve used Twitter, I received a lot of professional help from other philosophers.
Read More »
December 11, 2008 – 3:47 pm
I’m with Brian on this one (he’s the guy with glasses in the video). Particularly his second thought experiment.
Update: The link to the video is here. I took out the embedded video because it automatically plays. Which can be annoying to readers - especially return readers who have already seen the video.
More Nuanced Position: Even if it’s not cheating it has most of the main features that would make cheating wrong. Just like uttering something true that pragmatically implicates a falsehood with the intent to deceive someone might not strictly speaking be lying in the technical sense of the word, but has the same wrong making features that lying has..
December 2, 2008 – 2:47 pm
Here are two quotes from the first few pages in the new reader Experimental Philosophy edited by Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols.
Of course, the most salient difference is just the fact that experimental philosophers conduct experiments and conceptual analysts do not. Thus, the conceptual analyst might write, “In this case, one would surely say…,” while the experimental philosopher would write, “In this case, 79% of subjects said…” (page 4)
But just after that we get…
Not only does it seem to us that empirical considerations can be relevant here; it seems to us just obvious that empirical considerations are relevant. Surely, the degree to which an intuition is warranted depends in part on the process that generated it, and surely the best way to figure out which processes generate which intuitions is to go out and gather empirical data. How else is one supposed to proceed? (page8)
I’m not trying to engage in Gotcha! Philosophy. But the passages taken together are, at least, initially puzzling. I just wanted to point the apparent discrepancy between the two passages. Read More »
November 22, 2008 – 12:20 am
I’ve been writing a lot about safety accounts of knowledge recently (here and here). It’s time for more.
My concern is that DuncanPritchard’s Safety Account of Knowledge doesn’t easily avoid Kripke’s Fake Barn Country counterexample to Nozick’s Sensitivity Principle. Pritchard is aware that Jonathan Kvanvig has already raised this worry, but Pritchard’s response to Kvanvig seems unsatisfactory.
Let’s recall a version of Nozick’s Sensitivity Principle
Sensitivity Principle
If S knows P, then S does not believe P in the nearest possible world where P is not true.
Now we are to imagine Bob is traveling through Fake Barn Country. Fake Barn Country used to have a lot of regular barns that were a tourist attraction, but they’ve started to fall apart. Instead of building new barns, they build barn facades. Whenever a barn collapses, the citizens of fake barn country put up a fake brown barn in its place. Real barns are always painted red, but the red paint destroys the cheap barn facade material so they cannot make fake red barns. Now consider the following two propositions.
(RB) There is a red barn in the field.
(B) There is a barn in the field.
Bob is sensitive to (RB). In the nearest possible world where (RB) is not true, Bob doesn’t believe it. Because in the nearest possible world where (RB) is not true, there is a brown facade in its place. So, by SP Bob knows (RB). However, Bob is not sensitive to (B). In the nearest possible world where there is not a barn in front of Bob, he still believes that there is because of the facade in it’s place. So, if the Sensitivity Principle is true Bob knows that there is a red barn in the field, but he doesn’t know there is a barn in the field. This is an egregious violation of closure.
Now let’s recall Pritchard’s version of the Safety Principle. Read More »
