Friday, October 20, 2006

Links of Note

* Kenny Pearce has a good post on Berkeley and Moore on the external world.

* The 37th Philosophers' Carnival was recently at "hell's handmaiden."

* I'm currently reading Wilson and Sperber's paper on Relevance Theory, on one scion of neo-Gricean pragmatics. (h/t: This is the Name of This Blog) While it tends a bit jargonish, this is very cool area of philosophy of language that deserves to be more widely known outside of philosophy (I've often thought that issues relating to implicature should be taught in critical thinking courses -- after all, figuring out tricky implicatures is one of the most basic and universally important forms of critical thought). Although English professors tend to get it wrong a lot. I'm not sure if that's cause for pessimism generally, though, because a lot of English professors get a lot things wrong a lot. Those who'd like a quick background or refresher should read the SEP article on Implicature. See also Kent Bach's Top 10 Misconceptions about Implicature (PDF). Relevance theory is a recent popular attempt to re-work Grice's four-maxim account of implicature into an account that only requires one maxim (governing relevance). Doomed, probably, but interesting enough.

* Coturnix has a very interesting post at "A Blog Around the Clock" on whether Ramadan-style fasting is healthy. Or perhaps, rather, on what exactly the strain of Ramadan-style fasting is, since it obviously does, and that's part of the point.

* U2's Bono on the Incarnation.

* Daniel Nolan's The Varieties of Flirtatious Experience (PDF) to Jenkins's recent paper on the philosophy of flirting, which was linked to in a number of places in the blogosphere. He points out something I pointed out at the time, namely, that playfulness really doesn't seem as relevant to an analysis of flirting as Jenkins claimed. However, I think he still concedes too much by conceding that flirting is 'unserious'. Obviously it can be, and is often most enjoyable when it is, but I don't think Nolan appreciates how seriously some people take flirting. But he makes up for the lapse by recognizing something I had also pointed out, namely, that people don't always flirt with sex or romance in mind.

* Alan Rhoda has a good post on how not to think of formal logic.

* Don't forget that if you run into any interesting posts having to do with the period roughly from 1500 to 1800, or have run into any in the last month or two, you should nominate them for the next edition of Carnivalesque by sending the link to Henrik, the next host, at hkarll002[at]henrikkarll.dk or by using the Blog Carnival Submission Form.