You "...speak for more than one contemporary naturalist"

Somehow I went all these years without reading "Naturalism and Prescriptivity", despite having absorbed a lot of the views and forcefully defended them. I just checked sportswear websites to see how much I'd have to pay for a Michigan football jersey that says "Railton" on the back.

OUEC moral judgment paper

David Killoren of Coastal Carolina University, who organized a bunch of those split-screen PhilosophyTV and Bloggingheads debates years ago, asked me to comment on a paper for an Online Undergraduate Ethics Conference. The idea was for undergraduates to submit papers and faculty to comment on the best ones.

He sent me a nice paper from Quitterie Gounot of Swarthmore defending a Humean, externalist, and cognitivist approach to moral judgment. Following Peter Railton, I think that's exactly the way to go. There was a nifty point in her paper about the term "prescriptivity", often used as a necessary feature of moral judgment by internalists about the connection between moral judgment and motivation: real prescriptions that doctors give you actually are externalist in the way they motivate action and provide reasons.

Yongming Han to Brown for Ph.D

I'm really proud of my student Yongming Han, who is defending a Humean account of willpower in his undergraduate thesis, and who has recently accepted an offer to join the Ph.D program at Brown. He had offers from several good Masters and Ph.D programs.

We have a lot of excellent undergraduates at NUS, and Yongming was an awesome example. He read lots of opponents of mine that I hadn't read yet and laid out excellent ways to respond to them, and helped me learn about lots of recent psychological experiments that I didn't know. Working with him was not only wonderful from a teaching standpoint, but a boon to my research. I think he and the excellent people working on motivation and action at Brown will be able to do great things together.

"Possible Girls" in the Washington Post!

Thanks to Harvard philosophy major and excellent policy journalist Dylan Matthews, who provides a wonderful explanation of my paper at Ezra Klein's blog. 

Or maybe it was my ontological views?

Two weeks ago I was working on my computer in the airport when a woman pointed in my general direction and said to her friend, "So thin!"

 I thought to myself, "Yeah, I'm kind of skinny... maybe they like skinny guys?" And then I realized she was pointing to my MacBook Air.

Elijah Millgram's paper becomes "Was Hume a Gunman?"

Autocorrect on my new phone was set to change "Humean" to "Gunman". I suppose the Gunman theory of motivation might provide sufficient conditions for when action is motivated.

2013 schedule of talks

Thanks to generous support from the National University of Singapore (and from my Head of Department, who lets me teach more classes in some semesters to get other semesters off) I'll be traveling through the US, UK, and Australia to give talks on my research in 2013. Between colloquia, guest appearances at classes, and conference talks, I've got 61 appearances scheduled so far. It'll be a great way to get feedback on a book defending a Humean account of motivation (tentatively titled Desire's Explanations) and on a number of papers. This schedule will be updated as I get more invitations and fill in more details.

January 4 - University of California, San Diego - Ethical Reductionism
January 10 - Arizona State University - Virtue and Desire
January 16 - Utah State University - Zarathustra's Metaethics
January 17 - Weber State University - Divine Fine-Tuning vs. Electrons in Love
January 18 - University of Utah - Emotional Perception of Morality
January 25 - University of New Mexico - Zarathustra's Metaethics
January 29 - University of Central Arkansas - guest lecture
January 29 - University of Central Arkansas - Emotional Perception of Morality
January 30 - University of Arkansas, Little Rock - Emotional Perception of Morality
February 1 - University of Nevada, Las Vegas - Emotional Perception of Morality
February 5 - Biola University - Divine Fine-Tuning vs. Electrons in Love
February 7 - Claremont College - Desire's Explanations
February 8 - University of California, Riverside -  Desire's Explanations
February 12 - Old Dominion University - Divine Fine-Tuning vs. Electrons in Love
February 13 - Virginia Commonwealth University - Desire's Explanations
February 15 - University of Virginia - Virtue and Desire
February 21 - George Mason University - Virtue and Desire
February 22 - William and Mary - Desire's Explanations
February 25 - Coastal Carolina University - The Epistemic Argument for Hedonism
February 26 - Coastal Carolina University (class) - guest appearance
February 26 - University of North Carolina, Wilmington - Divine Fine-Tuning vs. Electrons in Love
February 28 - University of Texas (class) - The Desire-Belief Account of Intention Explains Everything
March 7 - Yale Moral Philosophy Group - Desire's Explanations
March 9 - Dartmouth College - Emotional Perception of Morality
March 13 - Williams College (class) - Humean Theory of Motivation Reformulated & Defended
March 15 - Brandeis University (graduate colloquium) - Desire's Explanations
March 19 - Brandeis University (class) - The Desire-Belief Account of Intention Explains Everything
March 21 - Bridgewater State University - Desire's Explanations (properties of desire)
March 29 - Kansas State University (faculty colloquium) - Desire's Explanations
April 1 - Kansas State University (undergraduate club) - Divine Fine-Tuning vs. Electrons in Love
April 2 - Northern Illinois University (class) - The Desire-Belief Account of Intention Explains Everything
April 3 - Northern Illinois University - Desire's Explanations
April 5 - University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee - Desire's Explanations
April 10 - Swarthmore College - Desire's Explanations
April 11 - Franklin and Marshall College - Desire's Explanations
April 12 - University of Pennsylvania - Desire's Explanations
April 16 - University College Dublin - Desire's Explanations
April 17 - Cardiff University - Desire's Explanations
April 22 - Oxford Moral Philosophy Seminar - Desire's Explanations
April 24 - University of York - Desire's Explanations
April 26 - University of Sheffield - Desire's Explanations
April 30 - University of Stirling (undergraduate club) - Emotional Perception of Morality
May 2 - University of Stirling - Desire's Explanations
May 6 - University of Aberdeen - Desire's Explanations
May 10 - University of Edinburgh - Desire's Explanations
May 14 - University of Glasgow - Desire's Explanations
May 15 - University of Nottingham - Desire's Explanations
May 18-19 - Character Workshop - Virtue and Desire
May 23 - University of California, Santa Cruz - Desire's Explanations
May 30 - Portland State University - Desire's Explanations
June 4 - University of New South Wales - Desire's Explanations
June 7 - University of Auckland - Virtue and Desire
June 19 - University of Auckland - Desire's Explanations
July 7-12 - Australasian Association of Philosophy - The Humean Theory of Procrastination
July 15 - Queensland Club - Emotional Perception of Morality
July 25 - Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga - Desire's Explanations
July 30 - Australia National University - Desire's Explanations
July 31 - Australia National University - Unequal Vividness and Double Effect
August 2 - University of Adelaide - Desire's Explanations
August 7 - Murdoch University - Emotional Perception of Morality
August 9 - University of Western Australia - Ethical Reductionism

And if you're too chill about everything, you might have nonpolar disorder

Giving people bear hugs and yelling at them that they're doing everything in a way that's totally fine is a classic example of aggressive-passive behavior.

Merry Christmas!

If the Ghost of Christmas Past had let Scrooge convince his younger self to be more generous, and the ghosts hadn't bothered to visit the newly generous older Scrooge as a result, it'd be a paradox of Christmastime travel.

A volume of sausage

I believe the German term for a collection of papers written by men to honor an old famous man is "Wurstfestschrift". 

Promising Researcher

I just won a Promising Researcher award from my university, and it comes with $5000 SGD which I'll be spending on the upcoming trip. I'm not a Kantian, so I would've considered making false promises to get the money, but my department head helpfully explained to me that the award didn't work that way.

The problem of other minds is that they get there first

I was excited when I thought up this refutation of external-world skepticism: if there's no external world, there's not enough stuff to realize belief, so there's no danger of false belief. So skepticism doesn't save you from error in any world.

Wrote it up, sent it out, discovered that Daniel Greco had made the same argument way more thoroughly in the July issue of Philosophical Review, canned the paper. It's given me more of an appreciation of skepticism about other minds -- it allows you to have beliefs, and as far as you know, they're all original.

All human cultures bite the red part of a watermelon slice first, suggesting an innate Universal Gastronomy.

Nate Silver and philosophy: at NewApps

Since the 2012 elections, I've been compiling the predictions of major pundits and ranking them for accuracy. Catarina Dutilh Novaes asked me to post about the philosophical issues surrounding election prediction for the philosophers at NewApps. The post includes a table of 25 people's state-by-state predictions, from the successes of Markos Moulitsas and Nate Silver to the abject failures of Michael Barone, George Will, Steve Forbes, and Dick Morris. 

It better be free with contract though -- I'm parsimonious

I don't imagine that I'll ever buy a cell phone because a celebrity is pitching it. But if Motorola ever markets their simplest Razr model with Occam's endorsement, they've got me.

I try to keep up with the empirical stuff, but...

I've never turned down a referee request from a journal before. The request from "Science Journal Publication" to referee "Influence of Warp Yarn Tension On Cotton Woven Fabric Structures" will, thus, be the first.

Happy Nousday!

October 15 is the day Nous and (I think) PPR start accepting papers again. I just sent a paper to Nous that I'd been waiting to submit for over a month.  I propose "Nousday" as a name for this occasion.

10 obols (pbk), ISBN 000000000001

On the right-hand side of the NDPR "Recent Reviews" page, there are images of the oldest known manuscript of the Republic, Augustine's Confessions, Descartes' Meditations, and Hegel's Phenomenology. I clicked to see if they had posted reviews by Glaucon or Princess Elisabeth or Schopenhauer or someone, but apparently the images are just there for decoration. I should've known; NDPR gets reviews up a lot quicker than that.

Planning world tour 2013

I'm on research leave in the first half of 2013, thanks to my department head's generosity in letting me teach extra classes in some semesters in exchange for time off in others.  The plan is to go on another huge talk tour like I did back in 2011, when I ended up giving 51 talks.  I got awesome feedback on papers, met lots of interesting philosophers, and in general had a great time.  So I'm eager to do it again!

The big project will be defending desire-belief accounts of motivation and the phenomenology of deliberation.  That's the side of my work that's gotten the best reception (the Nous and Phil Review papers are on that).  It may be time to turn it into a book, laying out the view, dealing with all the proposed counterexamples to the view one after the other, and drawing out the consequences for moral theory.  I'll also be doing some moral epistemology, and a maybe a Nietzsche paper or two.

The basic plan is to be in the warmer part the US from January through March, and take off from the Northeast to the UK sometime in April.  Then in late May I'll go to Australia and stick around for the AAP.  If you're up for having me make a stop at your department, send me an email!  

Ben Blumson's "Metamicrofiction" appears in Microliterature

Congratulations to my colleague, Ben Blumson, who has published a zero-word story.  I posted an equally short comment at the site.