Monday, October 29, 2007

Bits and Pieces

I don't normally Google myself, for three reasons: (1) There are a lot of Brandon Watsons; (2) mostly what returns about me are things I myself have written; (3) it's generally a bit silly to do searches for oneself. But I noticed that I got a few searches recently for "brandon watson" philosophy, and in a fit of curiosity waded through several pages of the obvious stuff and all the other Brandon Watsons, and did come across a few surprises, things I didn't know about or else had completely forgotten about.

#1: I once TA'd for a Philosophy of Literature course. One of the students whose papers I marked went on to publish a later version of the essay in the University of Toronto's undergraduate philosophy journal, Noesis. I must have missed the edition it came out in, or else had forgotten about it entirely. It's actually quite an interesting paper, taking Borges as a test case for the question of whether form and content can be completely separated in philosophy. It's actually quite an interesting paper. I'm thanked in the footnotes for my comments on the original. I do vaguely remember the essay, but don't recall at all my comments.

#2: I'm an objection in a footnote in Klaas Kraay's excellent paper Can God Choose a World at Random? (PDF) for comments I wrote here. I'd read the earlier paper, of course, but hadn't realized that Klaas thought the point worth responding to, since it's rather far from being a knock-down response to the particular point in question, and doesn't, I think, induce any serious problems for most of Klaas's argument. I do agree that most theists who hold that God can choose randomly would reject the idea that God is either a physical randomizing device or a nonphysical randomizing procedure; but I would have to see the argument for the claim that these are the only two possible classes of randomizer.

#3: In August of last year my other weblog was mentioned in Sundries, a newsletter on the 18th century.

#4: It's not really significant, but this post at Lawrence Solum's "Legal Theory Blog" appears to be the first mention of me in the blogosphere, a little less than a year before I even knew that the blogosphere existed. (It's a listing of papers at the Hume Conference in 2003.)