BREAKING: Quad cherry blossom trees also nice in Fall.

<THREAD> I’m now hearing this meme that says speech acts have to be things we do with words and can't be pictures, middle fingers, sandwiches, etc. Guys. It’s time for some speech act theory.

Lord, give me the strength to not make a 6-7 reference in my lecture for college students today.

If you have grad students working on climate change and global justice, please share with them this call for abstracts for a conference put on by grad students in the University of Washington's philosophy department. philevents.org/event/show/1...

I hope my Cartesian wife will read the Ethics and be moved by what I was moved by and convert to Spinozism already.

Feigl, to existentialists who despair and fall into irrational action: "Skill issue."

One of my favorite recurring things in 20th century philosophy is a philosopher, in this case Feigl, being open to the existence of phenomena like extrasensory perception and "mediumism."

My new #HOPOS project is to (1) figure out where Carnap lived in NM, (2) investigate whether Carnap and Feigl ever ate New Mexican enchiladas, and, if so, (3) determine what their answers were to "Red or Green?"

Going to write a paper about the conceptual inflation of 'all' and 'every' by logicians.

The heat is currently not working well in my office so the first two pages of this Feigl paper have really gripped me.*^ *Not claiming it's comparable to a winter night in Minnesota, though. ^ Currently waiting for the full PDF from ILL to see how things are resolved. brill.com/view/journal...

The world if Churchman and Ackoff had gotten their "Institutes of Experimental Method" instead of ending up at business schools. www.jstor.org/stable/185209

My phenomenal self might be subject to the rule according to which everything that happens in it proceeds from a cause but my noumenal self is just built different.

Socrates: The soul must learn, by degrees, to contemplate Being. This is the Good, agreed? Glaucon: Agreed. S: We have made progress in investigating justice, but do you find it difficult to work nutrient-dense leafy greens into your daily diet? G: It is as you say. S: That's why I take Athleti

Finally, an example in the wild that I can give to skeptical philosophy of language students to show them the power of Russell's theory of descriptions.

One neat fact about some mid-20th century analytic philosophers is that "the average person with philosophical interests" could hear them talk about performative utterances (Austin) or construction and analysis (Strawson) on public radio (BBC), or at their local Unitarian society meetings (Feigl).

I did actually show the diagonal elevator video in my proseminar yesterday.

Philosophy only appears to not make progress because we tend to ignore the discipline's history. For example, I keep seeing new books and papers about causation come out when we've known for at least a few hundred years that either causation doesn't exist or God makes everything happen.

Just once I'd like to will something stupid and not have God take it as an occasion to make my will casually efficacious.

I'm only one chapter in, but I'm mad at y'all for not making me read Nelson Goodman's Ways of Worldmaking before this week.

Philosophers are funny because they'll go all out refuting a claim like "Scientists before and after a revolution might be said to live in different worlds" but just shrug at claims like "Names are magic words that help me know Nixon is necessarily not a robot and kitties necessarily aren't demons."

Philosopher's Annual braces for Paul's reaction if editors go another year without saying one of his papers was in the the top ten of the year.

The real problem with kids these days is they never had to wait four whole ass months to find out Maggie, of all people, was the one who shot Mr Burns.

I use interactive polls in my large lecture courses and they work fine, but one innovative pedagogy idea I have that will improve student engagement and also make me and the university some money is to get a FanDuel sponsorship and allow students to bet the over/under on different answers.

This guy who wrote a book about critical thinking (which Stebbing cites in Thinking to Some Purpose), was friends with Wittgenstein, and thought he had a method to communicate with the living from the grave seems interesting. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_...

These filmmakers obviously didn't read the philosopher's amicus curae brief about organizing sports around nature's joints. variety.com/2025/film/ne...

In philosophy, all sufficiently advanced forms of logical analysis are indistinguishable from magic.

Focusing on kitchen table issues hasn't helped make analytic metaphysics any more popular so I don't know why people think it will work for politicians.

Weird vans with business names I don't know, palm trees next to a classic brownstone, spaceships on the lawn, Elvis blasted at all hours of night. The Roku City I knew and loved doesn't exist anymore.

If I hadn't gotten approved as a commenter on 2007 Deadspin back when you still had to get approved to join the comments section, I would probably be an ICE agent now.

Warning: If you read Churchman and related work by Ackoff, you may end up convinced that the one true science of ethics is management science done from a systems thinking perspective even if you don't really know what any of those words mean.

I'm not sure that Russ Ackoff made it past the table of contents of Feigl and Sellars's anthology.

In tenure letters the last few years I've been forcibly struck by how much service the women I'm reviewing are doing compared to the men. (Actual evidence backs this anecdote up - see below.) link.springer.com/article/10.1...

To hang in your kitchen, or by the front door. From the Logical Empiricist collection at Bed, Bath, and Beyond.

I was just reading about the way my institution acted dishonorably during McCarthyism (mentioned in Reisch's book on the Cold War and philosophy of science). magazine.washington.edu/feature/anti...

Working on a paper about Feigl and found this very interesting paper about value-neutrality and the history of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues and am now really interested in what is in J.J. Gibson's FBI file. spssi.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...

This must be a big relief for Oxford moral philosophy.

No mention in this 1904 News and Notes piece about how G.S. [sic] Stout's move to St. Andrews from Oxford is expected to affect the general rankings and mental philosophy specialty rankings in 1905's Philosophical Gourmet Report.

The real philosophy journal scandal goes back to 1921 when The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods shortened its name to The Journal of Philosophy so it was "more convenient for citation," which of course made it easier for Mind to drop psychology from its subtitle in 1974.

Herbert Feigl on W.V. Quine, who he thought was too easily impressed by a mere logical point leading to a "distorted picture of scientific method."

Hereby promising to make all my speech acts after this one constatives to avoid being thought of as a performative male.

Also worth noting that @msuarez.bsky.social and I have a chapter in the same volume on *Inference and Negative Analogy* – and broken bones, of course 🦴. #philsci link.springer.com/chapter/10.1...

The Kant Car

Back when I was trying to be a Kant guy and at all the talks scholars threw around first Critique passages they memorized in German and English that I hadn't, I always wished Saturday morning teen shows would come up so I could rap the City Guys theme from memory so they knew I knew stuff too.

Can you imagine how powerful J.L. Austin would have been if he had access to an LLM?

Rawls on the time Ryle fell asleep during the Q&A of his own after-dinner talk. (From Bruce Kuklick's "John Rawls and R. M. Hare: A Study of Canonization".)

"Imagine a piece of...technology that, when its wearer reaches a certain level of dehydration, stimulates in them the satisfying sensation of cool clear water running down their throat and filling their stomach. That would not actually be beneficial or helpful at all!" defector.com/butlerian-ji...

Looks like this volume on Mary Hesse edited by Pietro Gori is now published! If you were at #HOPOS in Vienna and went to the various talks and symposium on Hesse, you'll recognize some chapters. I wrote one on Hesse's early work (1952-1961) on scientific language. link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

Looks like this volume on Mary Hesse edited by Pietro Gori is now published! If you were at #HOPOS in Vienna and went to the various talks and symposium on Hesse, you'll recognize some chapters. I wrote one on Hesse's early work (1952-1961) on scientific language. link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

If it does burst, I wonder how our administrations in universities are going to justify their all-in-no-questions-asked attitude to incorporating AI into every aspect of university life, whether needed or not, whether harmful or helpful

I’m kind of speechless with this one. I can’t imagine the kind of person who continues to make the argument that it doesn’t count as real starvation if the kids were already sick.