My laptop tastes like aluminum

If people who lick a computer think it's human, it has passed the Turing Taste Test.

Tolkien-reflexivity

If Galadriel had said "What I'm saying now is not true" in The Fellowship of the Ring, it would've created a paradox of elf-reference.

See you at the Joint Session!

I've signed up for the Joint Session of the Mind Association / Aristotelian Society at Cambridge, and also for the philosophy of science and ethics conferences before and after. As I registered, I didn't have enough willpower to choose the title "Dr" when "Wing Commander" was available.

Faculty Fellowship at Murphy Institute

From late August 2014 to April 2015, I'll be a Faculty Fellow at Tulane's Murphy Institute! This will be an awesome opportunity to meet people doing cool stuff in ethics.

If you want me to come by and give a talk at your place in the US or Canada when I'm not busy Fellowing it up in New Orleans, let me know and I'll try to make it happen.

(The Murphy Institute, as far as I know, has no connection with Murphy's Irish Stout.)

No form of decision theory suggests biting the Predictor's ear

It'd be neat to present Mike Tyson, Manny Pacquiao, and Floyd Mayweather with Newcomb's problem. If Tyson didn't disqualify himself by biting the lid off the opaque box, we might discover that one boxer is a one-boxer and two boxers are two-boxers.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Mary sees red;
Hume fancies blue.
Possible sweethearts 
Love all of you. 

If p and not p
Entails every q,
All impossibilia
Are now kissing you!

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