Philosophy Carnival 54

Various EDITS: For apparently having gotten carnival # wrong, misspelled a couple names, broken a link, and confusion next host/last host. Hopefully that's all of them.

Welcome to the 54rd edition of the Philosophy Carnival. Or is thatC the Philosophy Carnival? Both homepages are good to know. This edition is hosted at The Uncredible Hallq. Wait, you figured that out already. Look what happens to my brain when I stay up until one in the morning to do something like this for all you people out there... no, I'm not complaining, just rambling incoherently because I respond poorly to shifts in my sleep cycle.*

Anyway, before we begin, I have just one shameless plug: I'm currently working on getting a comprehensive Philosophy Blogroll off the ground. Not only can you join, you can add it to your site in one of three forms! Details at the link. Now on to the carnival...

Meta

The Financial Philosopher makes it to the top of the carnival role by giving me a post arguing that the world needs philosophy. It's something I've been trying to convince everyone I meet of of late. Yes, this is true in spite of recent posts complaining about the way philosophy is currently done. FP has some good arguments, though I fear they will be of little use to me in trying to win over random acquaintances.

First Philosophy and Rhizomatic Mathematics has a post that could be philosophy of mathematics, could be philosophy of a lot of things, but there's also some meta-philosophy, so I'm putting it here. Has embedded in it the conclusion that philosophy has been influenced by a notion of mathematics that doesn't reflect the reality of how mathematics has been done most of the time.

Thom Brooks of The Brooks Blog asks: What is the point of staff development for university employees? Yet another reason for me to not go into college teaching, as per my current considerations. I seem to be getting a lot of those lately...

Ethics

Leading off the ethics section we have our illustrious founder of the Philosophy Carnival, Richard Chappell of Philosophy, etc. His post is called Temporal Neutrality: can we still care?, which contains some careful reflections on the relationship between time and value.

At NoodleFood, Diana attempts to formulate the argument against egoism given by Colin McGinn:

P1. Ethical egoism implies that helping others, with no benefit to self, is immoral.
P2. That's rubbish.
C. Ethical egoism is false.

I'm not all that sympathetic to egoism but... oh, snap!

Atheists Have Morals by Phil for Humanity could be put under philosophy of religion, but is really more notable for brief thoughts on the reasons underlying ethics.

The Agonist looks at some standard questions surrounding means and ends.

Politics

Sportive Thoughts has some comments on a Paul Krugman article that are well worth reading, even though the author says he ought to be spending his time talking about Plato.

There's a discussion of an article titled we aren't as ethical as we think we are at Trusted Advisor Associates. The original article is 44 pages long, the sort of thing that I'd love to read if I had the time. Of personal interest to me, because I've recently gotten into the habit of making jokes about being a horrible person, and then silently wondering if I could really be as bad a person as I sometimes suspect myself of being. Thanks to this paper, I now know that the situation is actually probably worse than I had thought.

In the counterintuitive but worthwhile theses department, we have Hobbes and Locke: Bedfellows? by Matthew Wilder of the aptly named Wild Philosophy (hey! I'm not the only one doing a lame name pun shtick!) It works out in great detail something I've gotten as a general vibe. After you've read it, I'd offer up this generalization for consideration: pairs of philosophers generally considered traditional opponents of each other often have surprisingly a lot in common, because they lived in the same milieu and therefore picked up the same sets of unquestioned assumptions.

Dinner Table Don'ts asks whether health care is really special.

Philosophy of Religion

Enigmania has a discussion of omniscience involving, among other things, a self-referential paradox. The paradox is quite clever, making the post worth reading, but also making it the sort of thing I'm only pretty sure I understood.

Primate Diaries has some interesting thoughts on parsimony, God, and multiple universes.

Martial Development totally wins for being provocative by opening a post with the line:

There are two kinds of agnostics in the world. The first are lazy and ignorant fools; the second reject the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza.

Also with comparisons between Spinoza's philosophy and Taoism.

Not only a great Phil Religion piece, but also a good piece on pedagogy, is Jennifer Lawson's God and The Perfect Burger Maker, which came out of this problem:

I have found that certain arguments against the existence of God, against the reasonableness of belief in God, or arguments that challenge certain qualities of God are fairly hard to make salient and powerful to some students.

I think she does a fine job of rising to this challenge here.

Metaphysics

DuckRabbit asks the age old question of "What is truth?--with specific context of the theories of McDowell and Davidson. I wonder about the truth about his profile artwork.

Contrastingly, at the blog Brains we have an age-new question: What Exactly is a Computer? (Probably not asked often enough, given their importance to modern philosophy of mind.)

Kenny Pearce looks at the ontological status of dreams in Berkleian metaphysics--not quite a canonical question, but an old sticking point for trying to make sense of Idealism.

Epistemology

Avery Archer of The Space of Reasons examines Reid's "Same Shop" argument for trusting our senses.

Jgiesselmann has an interesting post on BonJour and the Lottery Paradox

Aesthetics

Yes, we got a post on aesthetics. It's called Reversibility: Aesthetics Centered Ontology. Read it, because philosophers don't talk about aesthetics enough.

Word for grab-bag that I can't spell

Are You Anybody's Favorite Person? It's both a video found on YouTube and a commentary post by Alex Landis. Both are great, though by nature of the question, the commentary fails to give any sense of closure to the question. A must read if you want something to ponder for the next few days.

That's all for this week's carnival. The next edition shall appear in three week's time at The Brooks Blog. See you all then.

*Yes, that means this post may well be full of typos and even stupider mistakes. Hit me with a virtual bitchslap and I'll fix it when I'm lucid.