fragments of consciousness

PhilPapers news

In the two months or so since it launched, PhilPapers has thrived.  There are now close to 3000 registered users, and twice as many again active unregistered users.  Many journals have asked to be added to the database, and we are developing methods whereby this can easily be done.  In the meantime, there are a couple of major items of news.

First, PhilPapers has been awarded a grant of 200,000 pounds by the Joint Informations Systems Committee in the UK.  This grant will be administered by the Institute of Philosophy at the University of London, where David Bourget will be based for the next three years.  With support from London and ANU (which will now be the joint sponsors of PhilPapers), this grant will enable the development of many new features for PhilPapers.  Congratulations to David for doing all the work to make this grant possible.  Many thanks also to Barry Smith at the Institute, and to Tim Crane before him, for their support.

Second, we have introduced a system of editorships for PhilPapers categories, from the area level down to the leaf level.  Editors will have a set of powerful tools for populating and maintaining PhilPapers categories, as outlined in the editors' manual.  We strongly encourage qualified philosophers to apply.  If you're interested and have any questions, feel free to drop me an email.

We are hoping to develop the community around PhilPapers in a number of ways.  The editorships are one.  The discussion forums are another.  There has been some good discussion so far, but there is the potential for a lot more.  We would like to see these turn into a locus for all sorts of high-quality interaction between professional philosophers (of the sort that one sees on the best blogs, for example) whether concerning philosophical articles and books, philosophical issues, issues regarding the profession of philosophy, or discussion of ideas for Philpapers itself.  To that end, the forums are now moderated, and we have also introduced a PhilPapers blog based on the forums.   We strongly encourage qualified philosophers to take part in discussions in the forums, and to initiate discussions about matters of interest.

Online consciousness conference

The Online Consciousness Conference has been up and running for a few days now.  The conference, organized by Richard Brown, has a keynote paper by David Rosenthal and nine contributed papers, each followed by one or two commentaries, usually with both a video and a written version.  There are lively and high-quality discussions in the comment threads after each paper.  I'm a bit late to the party, having been out of town for the first few days of the conference.  But as it happens, six of the ten papers take my work as a primary target (Derek Ball on mysterianism, Kati Balog on the phenomenal concept strategy, Dave Beisecker also on the phenomenal concept strategy, Richard Brown on arguments for dualism, Barbara Montero on Russellian physicalism, Gualtiero Piccinini on first-person data), so I've posted comments in those six threads.  Other philosophers are encouraged to join in.

PhilPapers

I'm pleased to announce the launch of PhilPapers, a virtual environment for philosophical research.  David Bourget and I have been working on this project for a year or two now, with significant help from Wolfgang Schwarz.  PhilPapers is an outgrowth of the MindPapers project in the philosophy of mind, but it is much greater in scope and ambition.  PhilPapers encompasses all areas of philosophy, and it has many features that MindPapers lacks.

The core of PhilPapers is a database of close to 200,000 articles and books in philosophy.  Around this database, the site has all sorts of tools for accessing the articles and books online wherever possible, for discussing them in discussion forums, for classifying them in relevant areas of philosophy, for searching and browsing in many different ways, for creating personal bibliographies and personal content alerts, and much more.

The best way to get an idea of what PhilPapers can do is to go to the site and try it yourself (we've compiled a basic introduction to some of the features).  Even a casual browser can browse listings for new and old papers, search for papers in a given area or by a specific author, read the discussion forums, and so on.  However, we encourage you to create a user account, which enables many more sophisticated features.  If you do this, you'll have a profile page from which you can set up personal research tools such as bibliographies, filters, and content alerts (via RSS or email).  Your profile page will include a list of your own work (compiled via name matching), which you can edit where appropriate.  With a user account, you can also submit new entries (giving publication information and/or a link, and optionally uploading a paper to our repository), edit and categorize existing entries, and contribute to discussion forums.

Lectures and symposia

Two interesting sets of lectures that appear to be tied to forthcoming books are online: Robert Brandom's Locke Lectures on "Between Saying and Doing: Toward an Analytic Pragmatism" and Tim Williamson's Hempel Lectures on "The Philosophy of Philosophy".  The latter are accompanied by a full book manuscript.

In addition, there are two new PSYCHE symposia on consciousness-related topics.  There's a symposium on Gregg Rosenberg's book A Place For Consciousness (previously discussed here), with seven papers, and a symposium on Consciousness and Self-Representation, with four papers, four commentaries, and an introduction.

Discussions elsewhere

Elsewhere on the web, there have been a number of recent discussions that may be of interest to readers of this weblog, some of which I've been involved with.  Berit Brogaard  has made a number of interesting posts about two-dimensionalism: e.g. Chalmers on De Re Epistemic Ascriptions, 2Dism and Epistemic Extension, Modal Adverbials, and Another 2D Puzzle.  The last two of these have had lively discussions that have clarified a number of issues.  Eric Schwitzgebel posted on Chalmers on "Modal Rationalism", again with a lively and useful discussion thread.  Pete Mandik's work-in-progress blog has hosted a discussion of Brendan Ritchie's paper "Dualism and the Limits of Conceivability", as well as a lively thread on Hyperbolic Mary.  Wo has a post on Conceivably Possible Zombies.  Esa Diaz Leon has a post on Stoljar on actors and zombies and two on my paper "Phenomenal Concepts and the Explanatory Gap".  Robert Howell at Brain Pains has two posts on Daniel Stoljar's "Categorical Phenomenalism", with a reply by Stoljar.   As always, Conscious Entities has a lot of interesting material on consciousness.  And Mixing Memory has a fine zombie music video.

Update: See also a very interesting exchange between John Bengson, Adam Pautz, and others at Close Range on Being Aware of Uninstantiated Universals.  Also, Berit has a new post on 2D and Context-Sensitive Predicates.

New blogs

Things have been pretty quiet here the last few months, but I hope to post a bit more frequently in the months ahead.  In the meantime, a number of relevant blogs have been starting up elsewhere.  A full list is on my page of philosophical weblogs, but I'll highlight a few relevant things here.

There are now at least four other blogs by philosophers of mind on topics closely related to consciousness: Eric Schwitzgebel has a series of extremely interesting posts on phenomenology, introspection, and related topics; Gualtiero Piccinini has a lot of good material on representationalism and computation; Sean Kelly has a blog (lately inactive) devoted to his ongoing translation of Merleau Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception; and Pete Mandik has a lot on consciousness, perception, and neuroscience (not to mention a rock band with an intriguing name).  In addition, Conscious Entities has kept up a steady stream of interesting posts on all sorts of topics related to consciousness.

In other areas of philosophy, there are new blogs by M&E power couple Berit Brogaard and Joe Salerno, and another new M&E blog by Robbie Williams, as well as newish blogs by Luciano Floridi on the philosophy of information and David Corfield on the philosophy of real mathematics.  I should mention three student blogs, by Andreas Stokke, Brian Rabern, and ANU's own Richard Chappell, which have a lot of material on two-dimensionalism and modality.  There has also been an explosion of blogs on topics related to cognitive science, adding to old faithfuls such as Cognitive Daily, Language Log, and Mixing Memory, so I've now set up a cognitive science category on my weblogs page.  Finally, there's always 2hot4philosophy.

Zizek and me

John Holbo points to a discussion of my work by Slavoj Zizek, of all people.  The resulting discussion thread is long and animated.  I can't follow it all, but still: cool.

Update: John posts a lot more on the topic here.

Wikipedia on consciousness

The entry on consciousness at Wikipedia is coming along.  The section of the entry on philosophical approaches is a bit odd, though, and has provoked some argument on the entry's discussion page.   I don't think it's appropriate for me to get too involved, as I'm discussed in the entry.  (I had a Marshall McLuhan moment, but it seems that not everyone has seen Annie Hall.)  But I do think it would be a good thing for more philosophers to get involved with Wikipedia, as these entries are certain to be used more and more as reference works as time goes on.  If philosophers who know something about the philosophy of consciousness were to help flesh out this article, and related articles, that would certainly be a good thing.

Google perplexity

A few people have noticed that this weblog is not showing up in Google.  In a search on "fragments of consciousness" chalmers, there are numerous references to this site, but no links to the site itself.  I have no idea why this is.  There has been some talk of Google recently demoting weblogs in its rankings, but this should just affect relative position rather than inclusion.  If anyone knows of a way to fix this sort of thing, please let me know.

My main website is still showing up now that it has moved, but oddly, whereas the old site used to show up around third in a search for david, the new site doesn't show up at all in such a search (although my page of online papers pops up a few pages in).  It still shows up on searches for chalmers and "david chalmers", though.  Very strange.