Digesting the literature 5 May 2009 Many years ago, ians, really, I naively asked my lecturer who I thought knew everything in the field, how he kept up with the literature. He shrugged and said he couldn’t, and neither could anyone else. I thought he was just being self deprecating. Experience taught me better shortly. But there are tools that help, and now, in this all-electric age, they are online. A Philosopher’s Digest has just been started, which will give brief summaries of important papers, so those of us who do not follow every paper in every field can sound more intelligent and erudite. Damned nice of them, really. Hat tip to Leiter. While I’m at it, go read how sausages journals are made, by the editor of Nature. Philosophy
Biology Evopsychopathy 3: The explanatory target 9 Dec 20122 Jan 2013 In the Bad Old Days, biologists, including Darwin, used to speak of “instinct” as an inherited trait of organisms. Darwin has a comment in his Notebooks It is absurd to talk of one animal being higher than another. — We consider those, when the intellectual faculties [/] cerebral structure most… Read More
Evolution Alien life in Phoenix 10 Jun 2009 I find Paul Davies, the physicist who gets quoted on everything, really annoying sometimes. This is one of those times. Davies appropriates another’s ideas (Carol Cleland’s), arguing that we should look for a “second kind of life” on earth. Then he appropriates yet another’s work (Philippa Uwin’s work on nanobes),… Read More
Accommodationism Accommodating science: Astronomy 27 Feb 201427 Feb 2014 If science and religion do conflict, what are the points of conflict that have occurred? These tend to have arisen in historical contexts as the science evolved. I shall consider five sciences and how religion has responded to them: astronomy, or cosmology, geology, evolutionary biology and biology in general, medicine,… Read More
*ians = eons? It seems like making philosophy more accessible is a theme in the field at the moment – I’m glad many are making strides in this direction. =)
Many years ago, ians, really, I naively asked my lecturer who I thought knew everything in the field, how he kept up with the literature. He shrugged and said he couldn’t, and neither could anyone else. This is one of the major reasons why I never finish anything. There are always five more papers or books that I have to read before I close my research/reading on a subject and those five lead to ten more and those ten to twenty… At some point editors just stop asking when my paper will be finished. I’m incredibly well read but have the world’s worst publication record. I wonder why?