Monday, December 06, 2004

Philosophers' Carnival VI: The Aussie Connection

The 6th Philosophers' Carnival is now up at Melbourne Philosopher. I can't really tell you which posts I like, because I haven't had time to read any except the ones I had read pre-carnival, including the one by Siris (which is good, as usual) and the one by Jason Stanley at the Leiter Reports. Jason's is interesting not for what it says, because what it says is bullshit, but for what the commentators (who include David Chalmers and Alva Noë) have to say about it. It's also interesting from a psychological perspective, for while someone studying philosophy of mind (like, say, David Chalmers or Alva Noë) will have noticed that philosophy of mind is thriving like it never has before, and with an ever-expanding focus to boot, a person who studies philosophy of language, as Jason does, may be so wrapped up in his own area that he fails to notice this. You can't really blame Jason for his myopia, though. That's the way things usually work when you spend most of your time reading the literature of a specialized area of a larger discipline (I suspect there are plenty of philosophy of mind people who think that philosophy of language has been on the decline since the 1970s).

No comments: