The Ethical Werewolf ‡ by Neil Sinhababu : June 2011

My other blogs

I've blogged in many different places. Here are some of them:

I'm very proud of War or Car, where I posted a new thing you could buy for the price of the Iraq War everyday, for 121 days. This was during the 2008 elections, and I was glad that the antiwar candidate won. The site got its name because you could buy every American household a Toyota Prius for the $3 trillion price of the war. Or you could buy the Irish their annual beer intake, in Guinness, for a millennium. Or you could buy all the world's pandas their own personal stealth bombers!

Probably my greatest era of internet awesomeness was guestblogging for Ezra Klein long before he achieved his current superstardom at Vox. My posts there are pretty scattered, so they'll be hard to find. My work for Ezra catapulted me into other opportunities like filling in for Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthly. After that from 2008 to 2015, my friend Nick Beaudrot and I wrote a blog called Donkeylicious. As the name suggests, it was largely about Democratic politics.

During the 2012 elections, I created a little blog called VoteSeeing that tabulated election predictions and graded predictors on how well they did. The folks at Daily Kos Elections won the prediction contest, with Nate Silver and FiveThirtyEight a close second. Shortly afterward, a group of philosophers at a blog called NewAPPS got me to put up a few posts for them.

This post at the Philosophers' Cocoon has more about my job at the National University of Singapore, where I'm a philosophy professor.

Thursday, June 30, 2011

Berlin review of Pippin's Nietzsche

Anyone who took interest in my NDPR review of Robert Pippin's Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy back in September might be interested in another review by Kristóf Fenyvesi at the Berlin Review of Books. Fenyvesi is better acquainted with Pippin's recent work than I am. I agree with many points he makes about the place of psychology in the Nietzsche secondary literature, especially as applied to Pippin's book.

Philosophy of race

I wonder how many NASCAR fans have gotten interested in Critical Race Theory, only to discover that it wasn't what they expected.

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Best call for papers ever

Just got this email from the A-phil list:

Call for papers:
The History and Philosophy of Astrobiology

A conference on the history and philosophy of astrobiology will be held on Tycho Brahe’s island Ven, Sweden, September 27–28, 2011. The conference is arranged by the astrobiology research theme ”Astrobiology: Past, Present, and Future” at the Pufendorf Institute for Advanced Studies, Lund University. Registration and submission of abstracts is open until July 15th, 2011.

The two-day symposium will explore:
• The history of astrobiology from antiquity to the present, concerning its theories, methods, instrumentation, organization, and its interaction with society and popular culture.
• The philosophy of astrobiology, including for instance ethics, epistemology, theory of science, political philosophy, philosophy of religion, and cognitive science.

A conference on astrobiology. On an island. In (southern) Sweden (in the early fall). And did we mention that Tycho Brahe built observatories on the island? Whose awesome idea was this?

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

If this is your favorite philosophy blog, you have goofy taste in philosophy blogs

I'm flattered and slightly embarrassed to be included in a 'Favorite Philosophy Blogs' poll. It's against the rules to link, so I won't. While I appreciate votes for me, it's pretty obvious that lots of other blogs have content superior to my silly puns.

Probably the best thing I've put up this year is a puzzle about butts based on Sir Mix-a-Lot's "Baby Got Back."

Monday, June 06, 2011

Modal logic thought of the day

Boxes are made of would.

The Ethical Werewolf ‡ by Neil Sinhababu