Come to Singapore, eat delicious Asian food, and be Full!

Have you done many heroic philosophical deeds? Would you like to hang out with over 30 philosophy professors on our tropical island, eat amazing food, and enjoy the warmth of neverending summer? If so, you should apply for a job as Full Professor at the National University of Singapore!

Life in the Academy

My university's tenure procedures are based on Plato's Theory of Forms. To submit their tenure paperwork, philosophers must grasp and fill out an infinite hierarchy of abstract Forms.

mmmodal distinctions

If there are scientific laws about what humans will find tasty, they tell us what is nomnomnomologically possible.

Eppur si muove

Which reference to early modern science is the best term for the emergence of running quarterbacks in the NFL: "Newtonian mechanics" or "the Kaepernickan Revolution"?

My TED talk on moral luck

Here's the video of my TED talk back in October. (Really, TEDxNTU, which is kind of the minor league version of TED, at a local university.) They wanted me to talk about moral luck, so that's what I did. I suggest that consequentialists should address moral luck by judging people's virtue and blameworthiness by their motives, while still judging the rightness of actions by their consequences.

How-in-the-world did they miss that?

The heartwarming story of Being and his friend Tim, brought to you by unusually bad copy editing.

(the typo has since been corrected)

Modal Spice was my favorite

I've updated the wikipedia page on anankastic conditionals so that the example, "If you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my friends", is accurately rendered and properly referenced.

Ernst Zermelo would've commented

What would Bertrand Russell have posted about liking your own posts on Facebook? Perhaps, "I like all and only those posts that aren't liked by their own authors." 

Six degrees of Francis Bacon

If your objection to Lewis' modal realism is that the Chronicles of Narnia are bad fantasy novels, you're probably making an ad homonym argument.

The new poem of induction

If Goodman thought what good men ought,
then for all Hume ever knew
every green he'd ever seen
was a missing shade of grue.

TEDxNTU talk on moral luck

I gave a TED talk on moral luck Saturday at Nanyang Technological University. Probably the most fun example was about some hypothetical German cannibals a century ago, one of whom killed and ate some ordinary people, and one of whom killed and ate Hitler. They both had the same bad intentions, but on a straightforward consequentialist view (plus a few assumptions about history) the Hitler-eater kind of saves the 20th century. 

Joint intention

I'm trying to figure out whether to add a section on shared agency to my book. I'd love to have an example where Harold and Kumar want to smoke together, so when Harold brings the rolling papers and Kumar brings the marijuana, they're acting on a joint intention.

Treating the rear end as a mere means

Kant could hold that actions have immoral worth if they're done from the motive of booty, as the will is then determined by a posteriori principles.

[Null, as limericks typically don't have titles]

There once was a [person] from [place]
Who [had quite an unusual case]
[An attempt to react
 to the ‘forementioned fact]
 [Caused a punchline that fits in this space]

 -Elisabeth Helen Cohen

Achieving youdaimonia

I kind of like the view that morality is other-regarding, so moral value excludes prudential value. On this view, it's morally praiseworthy for me to accept severe pain to cause you slight pleasure. But it's still better from the standpoint of overall value and prudential value for me not to go through this pain for you. If I accepted this view, my moral theory would be youtilitarianism. (In my own life, the theory of sexual morality it supports is shedonism.)

Still, inventing the predicate calculus entitles you to call yourself Fr∃g∃

Øystein Linnebo was my logic TA (or TF, as they call it) at Harvard. For years I thought he wrote his name with the empty set symbol because he loved logic so much, until I learned that it was a real Norwegian letter.

Backhanded footnotes

Footnotes saying "I thank an anonymous referee for raising this issue" sometimes make me wonder if the author wants to say, "Look, I know this is irrelevant -- I'm only discussing it because a clueless referee made me."

50 Shades of Grue

The heroine of "50 Shades of Grue" is a masochist before time t and a sadist after time t. I don't like how the book glamorizes treating her sexuality as a property.

(I much prefer this poem about grue love.)

At Sheffield

After many drinks, one of the grad students asked me, "What are you, fundamentally?" I said, "I'm a werewolf."

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.