Robbins Library Notes

Good morning, readers!

Lots of great items in this week’s Library News & Notes. Some of the most interesting include:

• A Bing/Google comparison
• “The end of theory in science?”
• “How Many Scientists Fabricate and Falsify Research? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Survey Data”
• “58 Essential Resources For Every Mac Geek”
• More on Twitter and Wolfram|Alpha

Enjoy!

Good morning, readers, on this rainy Friday!

Just arrived in Robbins: the latest issues of American Philosophical Quarterly and Erkenntnis.  A list of the Tables of Contents follows below.

American Philosophical Quarterly 45(2) October 2008 (This is not currently available electronically.)

• Orthogonality of Phenomenality and Content, Gottfried Vosgerau, Tobias Schlicht, and Albert Newen, 309-328
• Agent-Based Virtue Ethics and the Fundamentality of Virtue, Daniel C. Russell, 329-348
• “Designer Babies” and Harm to Supernumerary Embryos, Mark Walker, 348-364
• A Unified Pyrrhonian Resolution of the Toxin Problem, the Surprise Examination, and Newcomb’s Puzzle, Laurence Goldstein and Peter Cave, 365-376
• Response-Dependence of Concepts Is Not for Properties, Eyja M. Brynjarsdóttir, 377-386
• Personal Identity Un-Locke-ed, Andrew Naylor, 387-396

Erkenntnis 69(2) September 2008 (You will need your Harvard ID and PIN to access this issue.)

• Sortals for Dummies, John E. Sarnecki, 145-164
• Must Differences in Cognitive Value be Transparent?, Sanford Goldberg, 165-187
• Contrastivism Rather than Something Else? On the Limits of Epistemic Contrastivism, Peter Baumann, 189-200
• The Causal Chain Problem, Michael Baumgartner, 201-226
• The Logical Structure of International Trade Theory, Frieder Lempp, 227-242
• Is There a Simple Argument for Higher-Order Representation Theories of Awareness Consciousness?, Mikkel Gerken, 243-259
• Too Naturalist and Not Naturalist Enough: Reply to Horsten, Luca Incurvati, 261-274
• Review of Heather Dyke, Metaphysics and the Representational Fallacy, Kevin Dewan, 275-277

Mulder: Mr. Simpson, we want you to recreate your every move the night you saw the alien.
Homer: The evening began at the gentlemen’s club, where we were discussing Wittgenstein over a game of backgammon.
Scully: Mr. Simpson, it’s a felony to lie to the FBI.
Homer: We were sitting in Barney’s car eating packets of mustard. Happy?

The Simpsons, “The Springfield Files” (1997)

Good morning, readers!

Via Bookforum.com: a podcast of an interview of Cass Sunstein by Christopher Lydon on behavioral economics. Here’s the overview:

Cass Sunstein gives us the half-hour short course here on “the most exciting intellectual movement of the last thirty years” — behavioral economics, that is, of which we had a taste recently with George Lakoff and Dan Ariely.

Behavioral economics is the demonstration (by clinical psychology, affirmed by neuroscience) that the “rational man” of neo-classical economics is in fact, in Dan Ariely’s book title, Predictably Irrational — that we are eternally kidding ourselves in our choice of credit cards, or of diets and desserts; that we tend to lurch without much reflection from over-optimism to over-anxiety about terrorist threats, war risks, and environmental melt-downs. Cass Sunstein is himself a demonstration of the spread of the new thinking from psychology and economics to law and politics. From the University of Chicago Law School, where he taught alongside Barack Obama for a dozen years, he has just moved permanently to Harvard, where he and Obama seem still to be channeling each other. Sunstein’s new book Nudge, with the economist Richard Thaler, is an introduction to a variety of not-quite-coercive strategies for helping people get what they really want: 401k savings plans, for example, that would be automatic for all workers who didn’t choose to set some of their wages aside. The general trick, Sunstein says, is recognizing that there’s less Immanuel Kant, more Homer Simpson, in each and all us than we’ve been taught.

Thoughts on this?  I know that there has been some criticism of “neuro-[insert discipline of choice]” and related studies, and one of the comments to the podcast description is along these lines.

Good afternoon, readers! It’s time for the latest posting of podcasts from Philosophy Bites:

• “Jonathan Wolff on Marx on Alienation“
• “Peter Singer on Using Animals“
• “Chandran Kukathas on Hayek’s Liberalism“
• “Richard Reeves on Mill’s On Liberty“
• “David Miller on National Responsibility“

Enjoy!

Those of my readers who are members of Gen X probably watched the Smurfs on Saturday morning cartoons. Before I left on vacation, I found a brilliant article by Ryan Somma, who outlines economics and the Tragedy of the Commons with reference to the Smurfs.

Yes, I admit that this article sees, prima facie, a bit ridiculous, but take a look at it. I’ll wager that you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

A hat-tip to Bookforum.com for this article.