Song for Philippa Foot

This is Kate Nash covering the Arctic Monkeys' "Fluorescent Adolescent."  I first heard it around the time I was teaching Philippa Foot's "Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives."  Foot would give up the bold morality/reasons externalist thesis in that paper twenty years after writing it, having abandoned the Humean theory of practical rationality.  But I'm still totally into the young wild Philippa Foot who thought that all our reasons come from our desires.

You used to get it in your fishnets
Now you only get it in your nightdress
Discarded all the naughty nights for niceness
Landed in a very common crisis
Everything's in order in a black hole
Nothing seems as pretty as the past though
Bloody Mary's lacking in Tabasco
Remember when you used to be a rascal?

Aseel al-Awadhi goes to Parliament

Congratulations to Texas philosophy Ph.D Aseel al-Awadhi, who is among the first four women to win election to the Kuwaiti Parliament. I overlapped with her in grad school, and we once had a fun multiethnic Super Bowl party together. Kuwaiti women only got the right to vote and run for office in 2005, so things are moving fast. In other good news, Sunni fundamentalists lost a lot of seats.

Now when your students ask you what you can do with a philosophy education, you can tell them: become a member of Parliament in Kuwait!

Moral Naturalism World Tour

Today I arrived in San Francisco. I'm going to be hanging out with Mom and Dad for a view days before starting what I called the "Moral Naturalism Project" in the big grant application that's paying for all my travel. So far I have two papers written -- "The Epistemic Argument for Universal Hedonism" (EA) and "How Double-Humeans Can Make Room for Error" (DH). Here's the places I'm going and the talks I'm giving, as far as I've planned:

May 9 - Fly from Singapore to San Francisco
May 12 - Fly from San Francisco to LA for USC talk on 12th (DH)
May 13 - Fly from LA to Tucson for University of Arizona talk on 13th (EA)
May 14 - Fly from Tuscon to Miami for University of Miami talk on 15th (DH)
May 17 - Fly from Miami to Knoxville for University of Tennessee talk on the 18th (EA)
May 19 - Fly from Knoxville to Austin
June 1 - Fly from Austin to Chicago to see my super-smart sister Supriya Sinhababu. Illinois State talk on the 4th (EA) and Illinois talk on the 5th. (DH)
[Now things get a little hazy. I have some free time between talks and I'll probably go somewhere on the Eastern seaboard for a few days but I don't know where.]
June 9 - Fly to London for King's College London talk on June 10. Chill at Oxford for a while, maybe Edinburgh. Return on June 19 or so.
[More haziness. Hopefully somehow involving girls.]
June 20something - Fly to Grand Rapids for Calvin College talk and subsequent Michigan talk.
Early July - Visit DC
Rest of July - Hang out with family in SF, or wherever they might be at the time.
Late July / Early August - Fly to Seattle for Puget Sound talk
August 5 - Fly from San Francisco back to Singapore