2013 as the blog flies

Mon 30 Dec 2013 09:36 PM

The hour is late, and it's time to review the year. The traditional method takes the first sentence from the first post of every month in order to generate a summary of the year's blogging; cf. 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012.

I: In a recent item at 3 Quarks Daily under the title The Problems of Philosophy, philosophers Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse lament that (according to them) contemporary professional philosophers are too worried about what's wrong with professional philosophy and pay too little attention to genuine philosophical problems.

II: My paper on cover songs, coauthored with Cristyn Magnus and Christy Mag Uidhir, was recently accepted at The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.

III: I posted an updated version of my paper on Mill on natural kinds, in advance of giving a talk at Middlebury College tomorrow.

IV: I was an invited speaker last week at DIY Publishing and the University, an event held by the NorthEast Regional Computing Program.

V: My paper with Heather Douglas, "Why novel prediction matters", has now made it into the limbo of things published online, waiting in the queue to appear in print.

VI: Via Leiter, I was led to Gerald Dworkin's recent Kindle e-book Philosophy: A Commonplace Book.

VII: I wrote in a recent post that I like the kind of book review which "offers a critical view of the issue and situates the book in recent discussions" and which also "treats the book as a bit of philosophy worthy of criticism."

VIII: I just read Bradford Skow's "Are There Non-Causal Explanations (of Particular Events)?", which is due to be published in BJPS.

IX: I am puttering around today and thinking about scientific realism.

X: Today marks the end of this blog's year eight.

XI: I have written several papers recently which have turned out to be a bit under 3,000 words each.

XII: The hour is late, and it's time to review the year.

There was blog activity for every month this year, although this month was thin.

Extrapolating from this sample, this year has been about what I've been reading, what I've written, what I'm talking about.