In Memoriam: Paul Cohen

I am sad to report that the mathematician Paul Cohen died on Friday the 23rd. He won the Fields Medal in 1966 for his work on the Continuum Hypothesis. More details here.

Some good news

First, I successfully defended my honors thesis today.
Second, I found out yesterday that I won best paper at The Second Annual Southwest Student Philosophy Conference.

Reductivist Moral Responsibility

Andy at Suphi (I would just put this in their comments, but they don’t allow outside comments. Weird.), presents an ostensible problem for his reduction of moral responsibility to rational praise or blame.
Background: he wants to argue that moral responsibility reduces to claims about praise and criticism with respect to one’s reasons for action. So, [...]

Omaha in the NYT

There is a feature on Omaha in last week’s New York Times Magazine. It is available online here. Things like this make me want to move to Nebraska. So does the new One Percent Productions email. This weekend we have Tilly and the Wall on Saturday, The Good Life on Monday, Neko Case on Tuesday, [...]

Scanlon on Substantive Rationality, and why he’s wrong

Scanlon has some interesting things to say about substantive rationality in the “The (most) rational thing to do” section of What We Owe to Each Other. The main thrust of his remarks is that so-called ’substantive rationality’ is not about rationality in the same way that procedural rationality is. He writes, “Requirements of the [...]

Unbelievable!

It is March 16th, and the high is 99 degrees! Arizona is ridiculous!

Desires providing reasons

The following is about two popular views of reasons for action. On desire-based theories (DB), all of our reasons for action are provided by desires (some DB theories claim only present desires, some claim idealized desires). On value-based theories (VB), all of our reasons for action are provided by facts about value, viz., facts about [...]