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I will now have four published articles in aesthetics, enough to count as a research programme if you squint a bit. Since my primary work is in philosophy of science, this might make me seem like a dilettante. If this just means that I have lots of interests, I do. It's what Eric Schwitzgebel recently called trusting your sense of fun. But the strict meaning of "dilettante" is someone who dips into different areas without really knowing what's going on, and that's not what I do. Trusting your sense of fun can mean publishing in diverse areas, rather than narrowly in one area of specialization, but it is compatible with engaging intelligently with those areas.
Moreover, a number of my papers have explicitly applied lessons from philosophy of science to philosophy of art: Pluralism about species in philosophy of biology provides a model for pluralism about art. Musical works understood as historical individuals are best seen as Homeostatic Property Clusters.
At a more general level, I think there is a natural connection between my interests in philosophy of science and my interests in philosophy of art. Considering scientific realism or natural kinds, I want to know what we should really think the world is like given that we tend to accept science. Asking what the world is like, given that we appreciate music, is not so different. I discuss this approach a bit in chapter 4 of my book, but it is more a way of going forward than a spelled-out doctrine.
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Pardon a cranky blog post.
Classes start this week. I am teaching two courses which I have taught before, so I am patching together syllabuses, pushing and pulling to make them fit. I am intentionally changing the courses some, in incremental ways. And the topics must be nudged to fit the calendar of this semester, to convert from topics grouped into two days a week (which I taught last time) to three, shorter days.
All of that is inevitable.
What is utterly evitable is the fact that this semester has 14 and a half weeks, which is a different total amount of time than last time I taught these courses. When I taught 17th and 18th Century Philosophy in Spring 2011, it was low tide for total hours of instruction with only 13 and a half weeks. So that course needs to either dwell on things for longer or have some extra material. When I taught Understanding Science last Fall, it was high tide with 15 and half weeks. So that course needs to sprint through some topics or drop something entirely.
I say it could be avoided, because it is the result of planning at the institutional level. Is oscillating semester length peculiar to UAlbany?
As a student, I never paid careful attention to the precise length of the semester. And there were few courses which I saw more than once. So I can't say whether it's a common phenomenon.
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In my discussion about whether planet is a natural kind, I focus just on our solar system. Although we expect there to be planets around other stars as well, I say we don't know enough about the structure of other solar systems to generalize too much. I also comment that a gas giant which didn't orbit a star would not be a planet.
There's lots of interesting recent astronomy which makes my claims about the details out of date.
Further work has allowed astronomers to identify dozens of planets orbiting other stars, so-called exoplanets. The amateur techniques for discovery are sufficiently routine that many of the discoveries have been made by amateur astronomers. Of course, we don't have - and may never have - ways of detecting smaller objects like Trojan asteroids in the orbits of exoplanets.
Last Fall, astronomers discovered what most news sources have described as a "rogue planet" and which the paper announcing it calls a "free-floating planet". Despite such loose talk, sources are clear that it is still an open question whether the object formed around a star (and so was born like a planet) or formed out on its own (and lacked sufficient mass to ignite as a star). In the introduction to the paper, the authors use the more cautious phrase 'Isolated Planetary Mass Object' (IPMO).
These are cool findings which I would discuss if I were writing the book now, rather than two years ago. The difference would just be in the details, though, and I think my general conclusions still hold.
Since natural kinds are contingent and identifying them is fallible, though, I fully expect there to eventually be some discoveries which entirely undo something that I say in the book. I would be deeply suspicious of any philosophy of science which was immunized against such revision.
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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. They mark this distinction by writing lower-case-p "philosophy" for the activity of thinking about hard problems and upper-case-P "Philosophy" for the profession. After starting with a poorly-adapted joke,* they pose their worry this way:
It should come as no surprise that philosophy should still be in the business of self-examination. But one may be stunned to find that, perhaps more than ever, the profession of Philosophy is fixed on questions of its existence. ... So, why does Philosophy - capital "P" – exist?
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The 50th anniversary of the publication of Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has prompted numerous authors to write pieces about what we really learned from Kuhn. Reading two of these, I am struck by the sense of having been whisked away to Bizarro world.
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