New resource for philosophy of mind and cognition 25 Oct 2007 David Chalmers and David Bourget of the Australian National University have a great new resource up of online papers on mind: We (David Chalmers and David Bourget) are pleased to announce the launch of MindPapers, a new website with a bibliography covering around 18,000 published papers and online papers in the philosophy of mind and the science of consciousness. This site grew out of a combination of David Chalmers’ old bibliography in philosophy of mind and his page of online papers on consciousness, but it is much larger and has many new capacities, programmed by David Bourget. The site address is: http://consc.net/mindpapers/ The top-level structure is as follows. There is an all-new section on the philosophy of perception (with 50 subtopics and subsubtopics), and many new subtopics and subsubtopics throughout. Part 1: Philosophy of Consciousness [2773 entries] Part 2: Intentionality [2365 entries] Part 3: Perception [1816 entries] Part 4: Metaphysics of Mind [2153 entries] Part 5: Miscellaneous Philosophy of Mind [2338 entries] Part 6: Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence [1187 entries] Part 7: Philosophy of Cognitive Science [1526 entries] Part 8: Science of Consciousness [3920 entries] Capacities include (i) links and citation information throughout, (ii) flexible navigation, display, and search options, (iii) the ability to submit and edit entries, (iv) the capacity for automated off-campus proxy access to commercial sites, and (v) a wealth of statistical information. There is also a separate front end for “Online Papers on Consciousness”. Where MindPapers now combines both offline published papers and online papers from free and commercial sites, Online Papers on Consciousness is devoted to free online papers (currently around 4700). It is based on the same database as MindPapers, but is organized in a way to emphasize issues concerning consciousness andcognitive science rather than the philosophy of mind. The address is http://consc.net/online/ We encourage everyone to try these sites and to submit relevant material that we are missing (try searching on your own name). There are tools on the site for submitting entries and corrections, as well as for notifying us about bugs and suggestions. –David Chalmers and David Bourget chalmers@anu.edu.au; david.bourget@anu.edu.au Australian National University. Logic and philosophy
Logic and philosophy X-phi in the NYT 8 Dec 2007 Courtesy of Brian Leiter’s blog comes a link to an article by Kwame Anthony Appiah in the New York Times about X-phi, or as it’s better known, Experimental Philosophy. This is an approach to thought experiments that tries to find out what people actually think before launching into the sorts… Read More
Logic and philosophy What is an Agnostic? by Bertrand Russell 10 Jun 2007 Bertrand Russell, a leading philosopher in his prime, was also a wonderful writer. And, it appears, many of my views were formed when I was but still Young in the Discipline of Philosophy by reading Russell. Here is an essay (stolen from here) from 1953, when I still was not,… Read More
History In defence of Keanu, and the 5th best scientist 28 Aug 2007 So they’re remaking The Day the Earth Stood Still? So what? I have more respect for Keanu Reeves after seeing the recent film A Scanner Darkly, and anyway he’s much better an actor than Will Ferrell, who did such a good job in Stranger than Fiction to my surprise. But… Read More
I’ve started my first reading (it’s already obvious I’ll need more than one) of Chalmers’ The Conscious Mind and I came across that site while doing a little extra-curricular research on his ideas. Needless to say, it’s a little daunting. But, hey! In a decade or two, I should have a good beginners idea of the subject. If I can live to be 120 or so, I might get a solid grasp of it.