ProfRon.net

Again, PHD Comics captures the essence of grad school in Going Green:

OK, I’m not quite convinced the “the number of undergraduate philosophy majors is ballooning“; but I suppose it doesn’t hurt to have the NYTimes act like studying philosophy is the thing to do: In a New Generation of College Students, Many Opt for the Life Examined.

There’s some talk that’s swirling around in popular linguistics about the question of whether ‘yo’ is emerging as the new gender-neutral pronoun. See the issue at Language Log here: Yo.

As I’ve noted before (hey, read the “Recently Viewed” links to the right), I think we already have a gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun in American English: it’s “they”. We always use it in actual speech when we don’t know the gender of the person already: “Somebody drove my car, and they left the mirrors all screwed up.”

Just a nice little bit on attention and what we don’t notice.

Unfortunately, these excellent buttons are currently sold out.

Brian Leiter links to a nice little collection of famous philosophers’ quotes on the subject “What is philosophy?” here; he also quotes two of the best, in my view:

Philosophy is thinking in slow motion. It breaks down, describes and assesses moves we ordinarily make at great speed - to do with our natural motivations and beliefs. It then becomes evident that alternatives are possible [John Campbell]

I see philosophy not as groundwork for science, but as continuous with science. I see philosophy and science as in the same boat - a boat which we can rebuild only at sea while staying afloat in it. There is no external vantage point, no first philosophy. All scientific findings, all scientific conjectures that are at present plausible, are therefore in my view as welcome for use in philosophy as elsewhere [W.V.O. Quine]

p.s. P.D. has a thought on this, and I have a comment there about that, if you care.

The excellent PHD Comics continues its fun-but-painful arc on grading with “You know you’ve been grading too long when…”

I was reminded recently that the expression “adminisphere” has actually entered my lexicon, and recalled that it was part of a useful triad of terms apparently in current military use that have excellent civilian application:

• Salmon Day: You spend all day swimming upstream just to get fucked and die.
• Adminisphere: The “powers that be” above your immediate superior.
• Blamestorming Session: The process of determining who in the adminisphere is at fault after a salmon day.

(Originally from eclecticism.)

Chaospet.com is beginning a fun-looking series of 12 comics about philosopers, where the philosophers will be Daniel Dennett, Friedrich Nietzsche, David Lewis, Baruch Spinoza, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Thomas Kuhn, Jean-Paul Sartre, St. Thomas Aquinas, Rene Descartes, Rudolf Carnap, Graham Priest, and Donald Davidson. The first, on Dan Dennett (”Quining Qualia“), is a nice start: