I’d like to announce a new group blog, called The Philosophers’ Cocoon! I’m especially pleased to do so, since I’m one of the contributors. As the Mission Statement of the blog states, it is primarily “by and for” early-career philosophers, and dealing with topics like publishing, grad school, the job market and academia more generally. The founding member is Marcus Arvan, and we’ve already got a nice group of contributors. I’ve just posted my first contribution to the blog, on Editing a Book — effectively a “behind the scenes” account of how my volume Contemporary Aristotelian Metaphysics, came to be, plus some general guidelines about the editing process.

I quite like the idea and the mission statement, and I believe that the blog will be a success. I may repost some material from my own blog there, but I will especially make use of this new venue to post exclusively philosophy-related material, given that this blog deals with my interests much more generally. This doesn’t mean that I’ll stop posting about philosophy on this blog though!

Anyway, go ahead and have a look, leave a comment, and subscribe to The Philosophers’ Cocoon!

PhilosopyTV! Thomas Hofweber and myself discuss the possibility and foundations of metaphysics in the latest episode. We recorded the episode already some time ago, and I’m pleased to see that it’s now out. Thanks to David Killoren and the other folks at PhilosophyTV for making this happen.

These episodes are supposed to be fairly accessible, so we don’t go into a lot of technical detail, and have tried to avoid unnecessary jargon. To be honest, our discussion is just a brief glimpse into the very broad topic of the foundations of metaphysics — or metametapysics — but I hope that it’s of interest especially to those who may not be so familiar with the literature. For background reading, I recommend for instance Thomas’s ‘The Meta-Problem of Change‘ (2009) and my ‘In Defence of Aristotelian Metaphysics‘ (2012).

Tahko & Hofweber - PhilosophyTV

The discussion opens up with quite a long intro from Thomas, but I think it’s helpful. We then go on to discuss some more detailed topics, such as the status of mathematical objects, the epistemology of essence, and ‘esoteric’ and ‘egalitarian’ metaphysics — notions coined by Thomas.

I have to say that it’s not easy to have a discussion like this when you cannot see the other person (the video is recorded separately). What made it even stranger was that I was already at Chapel Hill at the time of recording, and we were in fact in the same building! Thomas was in his office, and I ended up using Simon Blackburn’s office. We had some technical issues as well, but the end result seems to work just fine (they did a good job with it).

Hope you enjoy it!

If you haven’t yet heard of CauSci, lead by Rani Lill Anjum, then this conference will serve to highlight the project. Looks great!

CauSci is pleased to announce our next international event, Causation in Science – Temporality, Modality and Reduction.

The workshop will take place at UMB on 3-5 September 2012.

See the list of titles and abstracts here: http://www.umb.no/causci/article/cauphy-program

More information will be posted on the webpage closer to the event about travel and accommodation. http://www.umb.no/causci/article/causation-in-physics

Registration is free and open to anyone. Please register by sending an e-mail to sigurd.tonnessen@uit.no within 1 August.

Speakers:

Mauricio Suárez, Complutense University Madrid and LSE, London
Iñaki San Pedro, Complutense University Madrid
Carl Hoefer, ICREA & Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona
Mauro Dorato, University of Rome 3
Ragnar Fjelland, SVT, University of Bergen
Stephen Mumford, University of Nottingham
Allen Stairs, University of Maryland
Sigurd Tønnessen, University of Tromsø
Johan Arnt Myrstad, University of Nordland, Bodø
Dagfinn Døhl Dybvig, University of Nordland, Bodø
Thor Sandmel, University of Oslo
Anita Leirfall, University of Bergen
Fredrik Andersen, Norwegian University of Life Sciences (UMB), Ås
Elias Núñez, Norwegian University of Life Sciences (UMB), Ås
Rani Lill Anjum, Norwegian University of Life Sciences (UMB), Ås

Background
The aim of the project Causation in Science is to develop a metaphysically plausible notion of causation that is also scientifically robust. It is hard to see how this can be achieved without considering some of the wider issues related to a realist notion of causation in modern physics. The following themes will be discussed at the workshop:

Causal realism
The concept of causation is controversial in physics. On the one hand, there is a view expressed by Bertrand Russell, and currently revived by Huw Price and others, that causation should have no place within an informed objective description of the world. On the other hand, many of the key notions employed by modern physics are characterised in dispositional terms, such as spin, charge, mass and radioactive decay. Causal dispositionalism suggests that this gives us at least some causation within physics.

Simultaneity
Quantum entanglement has been suggested by some as demonstrating that there can be simultaneous causation at a distance. Such causal non-locality, if it really is the case, would count against the spatial contiguity that Hume thought conceptually central to causation. Relativity theory, however, seems to imply that there cannot be simultaneity of cause and effect. If they are spatially distinct events, there is no sense in which they are simultaneous, and any causal influence between them must take time to travel. The description of simultaneity in physics thus seems to have philosophical implications for how to best understand causation with respect to locality.

Time and space
In modern physical theories there are various theories of space/time theories, some of which seem irreconcilable (for instance, standard Quantum Mechanics utilises absolute space/time while Quantum Field Theory utilises relative space/time). There are also diverging theories on the ontological nature of space/time ranging from illusion to physical object. What conclusions we should draw concerning simultaneity and causation will depend on how we understand the notions of space and time.

Modality
Another central issue is the kind of modality that is found in physics. Deterministic, indeterministic and probabilistic laws are usually linked to modal notions of necessity, randomness/pure contingency and probability. The modality of a tendency is more than pure contingency, yet short of necessity, and it does not carry any commitment to determinism or indeterminism. There might, however, be some irreducibly probabilistic tendencies. In virtue of what a law is supposed to be deterministic, indeterministic or probabilistic is thus something we need to make explicit. Another issue is how these modalities relate to predictability.

Reductionism, holism and emergence
Physics is often presented as the key, fundamental science to which all other sciences are supposed to reduce, be modelled, or at least relate. An open question is still whether there could be a role for holism and emergence within physics itself. If so, this would at least leave open the possibility for real emergence within other sciences.

Program: http://www.umb.no/causci/article/cauphy-program

Brewery: Haanbryggeriet (Norway)
Beer: Norse Porter , 6.5% ABV, 32 IBU, 89 EBC, 500ml bottle
Listed Ingredients: Marris Otter Pale, Munich, Crystal and Brown Malt + some Chocolate Malt and ots of Hops for bittering and aroma
Style: Porter
Rating: 4.1/5
Reviews on BeerAdvocate
Vegan Friendly

Haandbryggeriet: Norse Porter

Appearance: Pitch Black, pours a chocolate coloured head with hints of sediment. 4/5

Aroma: Very rich malty chocolate and coffee. Strong roasted aromas with a hint of smoke. Some alcohol. 4.5/5

Taste: Surprisingly strong alcohol taste, although it’s not such a strong porter. Roasted malt and dark chocolate, like a strong espresso; some bitterness too. 4/5

Mouthfeel: Soupy, full bodied. 4/5

Overall: I feel like this could be a great porter, but somehow the alcohol comes through too strong, and it feels like they’ve tried to pack a little bit too much into this beer. Still, it’s a great porter and certainly differs from the standard. One point worth noting: when I opened the bottle (cool room temperature), I got a huge burst of foam and beer coming out. I lost a portion of the bottle due to this, but more importantly this suggests that the post-fermentation has gone a bit wrong. That may be responsible for the strong alcohol taste as well — indeed, it’s possible that there’s more alcohol here than stated. 4/5

Another point: my bottle was bought from the US, imported by ‘Shelton Brothers’. It’s labelled as ‘Norse Porter’, but BeerAdvocate tells me that this is an alias for HaandBryggeriet’s porter. That doesn’t seem to be the case: BeerAdvocate reports the ABV as 6.0%, but my bottle says 6.5%. So clearly there’s something strange going on here… HaandBryggeriet’s website lists a ‘Norse Porter’ with these characteristics.

Let me conclude the review by praising the four guys at Haandbryggeriet a little: I’ve had some excellent beers of theirs, such as Norwegian Wood, Nissefar, and Dark Force. They’re all at the very top end of the thousands of beers I’ve tried, with a great character and story to them. I hope to review more of their beers in the future, at the moment I’ve got Odin’s Tipple waiting!

Previous entires: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8.

So, it’s time for my last diary entry. I’m heading to the West Coast in just under a week, but things have been winding down here already since late April. There’s an end of the year party this Saturday, so this will make for a natural ending to my series of diaries. However, I will be back in North Carolina towards the end of June, for the Carolina Metaphysics Workshop, and I’ll be sure to report about that.

The Chapel Hill Bell Tower

There isn’t an awful lot to report, since I’ve mainly been revising and writing up some of my papers, but there are a few things that I want to mention. The first of those is something that has been all over the media here in North Carolina pretty much right from when we arrived in January: the proposed amendment to the state constitution. Now, this doesn’t involve me in any way directly — obviously I don’t have the right to vote here — but the whole ordeal has had so much visibility and political significance that I feel I should comment on it somehow. I first learned about the proposed amendment when I saw banners calling people to vote against the amendment. A quick search revealed what it was about: introducing a ban for same-sex marriages into the state constitution. Of course, same-sex marriages were already illegal, but the amendment makes it much more difficult to ever change that. Now, as you may have heard, the amendment passed, with 61.05% voting in favour. I was rather surprised about the result, but that’s largely because Chapel Hill is at the very heart of the most liberal area of the state; most of the surrounding counties voted against.

I’m not going go into the argument for and against the amendment (but see the previous link for a summary). What is more interesting to me anyway are the political implications. The most obvious of these is the upcoming presidential election. Interestingly, Obama waited until today to announce his stand on the whole same-sex marriage issue, and he explicitly sides with the LGBT community. This is of course a bit of a turnaround for Obama, and I suspect that it’s primarily a strategic move to support his campaign — Biden was already known to support same-sex marriage. It’s a gamble, as while the majority of Americans apparently support same sex-marriage, it is nevertheless banned in 31 states. Well, I’m not one to get into politics, but what is surprising to me about the situation is that while nearly all other countries in the world are moving forward on this issue, the US is actually moving backward.

My talk at Duke University

Leaving that issue behind, I did want to say something about my recent talk at Duke University in Durham. I was originally scheduled to give the talk at the end of March, but due to sad circumstances which I mentioned in my previous diary entry, the talk got postponed. I’m pleased that we were able to reschedule, as it was a pleasure to give a talk at Duke. My talk was on ‘Quantification and Ontological Realism’ — basically a critical note on Ted Sider’s recent book. You can find the Prezi slides here. I haven’t posted the draft yet, but I’m working on a short Analysis-style piece based on this talk, and I’d welcome comments if anyone is willing to read it (drop me a message or leave a comment). I had a decent audience at Duke, and there was a good discussion afterwards, involving Sara Bernstein, Alex Rosenberg, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Michael Ferejohn, David Sanford, and others. I won’t go into the details here — I’ve written about the topic on the blog before — but I may post the draft at some point. I am also planning on a popular science inspired post about the Higgs boson, which I used as one of my examples in the talk (and elsewhere). Myself and Elizabeth were also wined and dined at one of the top restaurants in the area, Nana’s — where the chef improvised a vegan menu for us. Thanks to Duke folks for their hospitality and the interesting discussion!

Carolina North Forest

Well, I don’t have much else to report. In brief, it has been way too hot here, I’ve tried to do a little bit of work, and I’ve gotten back to decent running mileage (managed a 73.4 mile or 118km week last week, my highest mpw this year). Today I’m not feeling great though, hopefully I’m not getting ill again. I’ve effectively said my goodbyes to the Carolina North Forest, where I’ve done the bulk of my running (the recent Philosopher’s Way race took place there as well). Other than that I’ve been getting through the collection of craft beers that I accumulated whilst here (some beer reviews coming up soon), and I’ve fiddled around with this new WordPress theme, which is fortunately slowly finding its final shape (but I still need to fix a few things).

Next Tuesday I’m off to Seattle and will be heading straight down to California from there. From May 21-28 I’ll be in San Francisco (let me know if you’re in the area!) and after that it’s a road trip with stops at least in Yellowstone, Colorado, Utah (Zion), and a bunch of national parks — I’ll try to report from the road. Before that I hope to get a post up about my previous road trip in Deep South, I’m just trying to get through the photos!

Make note of this major conference in London, October 2012. It’s organised by Anna Marmodoro’s ‘Power Structuralism in Ancient Ontologies’ project and it features a very impressive list of speakers!

The Metaphysics of Relations

International conference organised by the Power Structuralism in Ancient Ontologies project

3rd – 5th October 2012

Institute of Philosophy

Senate House, Room 349, third floor
London

Invited Speakers

Jeff Brower (Purdue University)
Maureen Donnelly (SUNY at Buffalo)
Mauro Dorato (University of Rome)
John Hawthorne (University of Oxford)
John Heil (Washington University at St Louis)
Jon Jacobs (St. Louis University)
James Ladyman (University of Bristol)
Jonathan Lowe (University of Durham)
Fraser MacBride (University of Cambridge)
Stephen Mumford (University of Nottingham)
Jonathan Schaffer (Rutgers University)
Peter Simons (Trinity College Dublin)
Jessica Wilson (University of Toronto)

Registration & accommodation

Registration is £15, but free for graduate students.
Registration will be available shortly via the on-line registration system.

The President Hotel, in Russell Square, has 20 rooms provisionally on hold for those attending the conference. The rate is £81 per night (single occupancy), £108 (double); this rate is not discounted from the hotel’s normal rates, but does allow attendees the opportunity to stay in the same place. These pre-booked rooms will be allocated on a first come first served basis. It is possible that the Hotel will have additional rooms available but this cannot be guaranteed. In order to make a booking please use the conference’s on-line registration system or contact directly the Central Reservation Office quoting reference ‘Philosophy Conference’. Contact details are as follows:

Telephone: +44 (0) 20 7278 7871/2/3
Email: info@imperialhotels.co.uk
Fax: +44 (0) 20 7837 4653

We also hope to offer several student bursaries; details of these will follow.

This is likely to get popular, so I figured that I might submit a photo too — presumably it will pop up at some point. The idea originates at Feminist Philosophers and was inspired by a similar project for the sciences. Part of the idea is to overcome stereotypes. I guess I look like a fairly stereotypical philosopher (a bearded white guy), but I submitted a running-related photo which might support the idea a bit better. If you’re either a philosopher or a scientist, go submit your photo!

Race date: 5.5.2012
Official Finishing Time: 1:14:21.7 gun time
Official Position: 12/177 (finishers), which puts me in the fastest 6.78%
Race number: 205 (264 in the results)

How could I not run a race called Philosopher’s Way, especially when it’s on the trails that I’ve been running on (Carolina North Forest) for the last four months! This is a small race that has been going on only for four years, but you wouldn’t have been able to tell it from the organisation, which was very smooth. They had both a 7k and a 15k event, I ran the latter. This was at the end of a rather heavy training week though — in fact on the week of my highest weekly running mileage this year (73.4 miles), so I was never going to go all out. Yet, I really wanted to do this race, so I decided to just do it as a tempo or steady state run.

Starting off

The experience of raving on a tough single track trail was something of a novelty to me. I’ve done a few trail races before, but never quite like this. Once the starting sprint was over, I found myself at the back of a group of seven runners, with not much of change of overtaking any of them. Had I been running with fresh legs I might have been a bit frustrated, but given the situation I was quite happy to just follow that group and see how things develop. The pace was fairly leisurely to me and I even had a bit of a chat with some of the fellow runners. This went on until about 6k, when some of the people in the group clearly started to run out of steam. Overtaking was necessary, but it was much easier than I had thought, as most people were very good about getting out of the way when they saw that someone was at their tail. Only a couple of times I had to indicate that I’d like to pass, and by my count I overtook at least 11 people. I wasn’t overtaken at all myself, so it appears that I could’ve started a bit closer to the front of the pack…

Focused on the second half of the race

Anyway, I didn’t even think of this event so much as a race, it was really just a pleasant day out on the trails with some like-minded people. A truly enjoyable day. I started speeding up a bit on the second half of the race, but I was never pushing too much, and I could’ve probably been much faster on fresh legs. 12th out of 177 runners wasn’t a bad result given that, and I just made it home under my arbitrary target of 1:15h. I thought that it wouldn’t happen, but my Garmin measured the course well short of 15k (probably due to the GPS not being able to keep up with all the twists and turns), so I was pleased to find myself at the finish sooner than I thought. Talking about the finish: they had set up the Finnish flag there! Of course, it was supposed to be a pun, but for me it had a double meaning. Come to think of it, it’s likely that I was both the only Finn and the only professional philosopher doing the race.

Finally, the “race village” was lovely: a nice spot in the middle of the woods with some running gear on show, a recovery zone, and — most importantly — plenty of Carrboro Coffee Company coffee, and bagels with peanut butter!

Well, if you want some hard data, follow the Garmin link:

Official results here (PDF).
Garmin data here.

(Thanks to Elizabeth for the photos.)

As you will have noticed if you’ve visited my site in the last couple of days, I’ve adopted a new WordPress theme and fiddled around with the content as well. The primary reason for this are the performance issues that my previous theme was causing — I should’ve really looked into it a lot sooner. Anyway, things are hopefully running smoother now, although I’ve got several things to sort out still.

The theme in use now is called Sentence, by Kriesi. It’s a premium theme, i.e. I paid for it. The main advantages of this are that the theme is thoroughly documented and supported, gets frequent updates, and is in general better optimized (for instance, it’s responsive to mobile devices by scaling down the resolution, do try it out on your phone or tabloid!). Having said that, this guy Kriesi is obviously not a native English speaker, and I’ve had to hunt down some typos in the PHP files, as well as fix obvious bugs… The widgets require a some more work too, and there are a couple of performance bottle necks that I might try to sort out eventually. Anyway, any feedback on the functionality and performance of the website and blog are much appreciated.

Couple of things worth noting. Firstly, the FeedBurner RSS feed for the blog is still active, it’s here. It looks like I scared some subscribers away by briefly making the feed ‘summary only’ when browsing through the various options with the new theme. Not to worry: I plan to keep the full content visible in the feed, and it should work as before now. I also discovered a handy little thing that shows the number of current subscribes to the public, check it out:

While I’m advertising FeedBurner feeds, recall that I also have one for my Garmin Connect activities (with detailed descriptions of my runs, including maps). There’s also one for my PhilPapers RSS feed, where you can mainly stay up to date about my publications.

Secondly, a nice feature of this new theme are portfolios. I’ve wanted to find a way to feature my photography ever since I integrated my blog and my website, and the portfolios seem to be a good way of doing it. There are already some of my favourite shots up on the Photography page (and also a link to my full gallery, which I’m hosting on this same server). I will keep the content of the portfolio down to a small number of my best and favourite photos though, instead of clogging it up — check back later for new additions while I’m going through my catalogue. Note also the possibility of ‘liking’ individual shots in the gallery: basically you can click through to the full image from the portfolio link for a nice feature page with the photo and a description, and you can add comments, ‘like’, or tweet about any individual photo.

Well, that’s the bulk of it, but like I said, there will be some further improvements coming, and the site is very much still looking for its final appearance (among other things, I plan on tweaking my CV and research pages), and there are some silly features in this theme that I need to fix (especially concerning featured images of a blog post). Any feedback on this is welcome, so take your time, browse around, and leave a comment or drop me a message.

The blog/website has a temporary look as I try to get into the bottom of serious the performance issues caused by the WordPress theme I was using (PressPlay). So, for a while, expect some quirky behaviour and broken bits, as well as ugliness. I’ve had a much too long love-hate relationship with the previous theme and I’ve been hoping for an upgrade to it, but the developers seem to have abandoned it altogether as their own website is dead. Obviously I had customised the theme quite a bit as well, so I’ve got a lot of work to do to make the blog pretty. I’m on the lookout for a more functional theme, but this temporary one (Eos) that I once considered adopting will do in the meanwhile. Anyway, all the content is still here, but one thing I need to figure out is how to make the actual blog posts more visible (since I’ve changed the starting page to my ‘About’ section).

I used Pingdom to test the performance of the site and to figure out what was going wrong. It turned out to be an excellent tool.

Stay tuned for updates…