Josh May » news

IEP WordPress Showcase

Josh May — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 04:40:26 +0000

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy website I redesigned last summer (along with help of course) has been inducted into the WordPress Showcase!

http://wordpress.org/showcase/the-internet-encyclopedia-of-philosophy/

It doesn’t do much, but it’s nice to be listed among the likes of The Harvard Gazette, Mozilla Labs, Larry King, and… well, Kim Kardashian.

Burge Conference

Josh May — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 16:35:24 +0000

I’m very excited for this conference!

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The University of California, Santa Barbara Department of Philosophy and the Stephen Humphrey Fund for Excellence in Philosophy present

Themes From Burge

A conference in honor of Tyler Burge. Speakers include Tyler Burge (UCLA), Ned Block (NYU), Fred Dretske (Duke), and Christopher Peackocke (Columbia), and discussants include Karen Bennett (Cornell), Alex Byrne (MIT), Peter Graham (UCR), Bernard Kobes (ASU), Krista Lawlor (Stanford), Joseph Owens (Minnesota), James Pryor (NYU), and Brian Weatherson (Cornell).

May 1, 2010
9 AM to 6 PM

The McCune Conference Center, Humanities and Social Science Building room 6020
http://www.philosophy.ucsb.edu/conferences/
Registration: luke_manning@umail.ucsb.edu

CONFERENCE FLYER (PDF)

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Weakness of Will Paper

Josh May — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 22:40:10 +0000

Richard Holton and I have just finished a draft of a paper we’ve been working on for the past year or so:

What in the World Is Weakness of Will? (PDF; draft)

Here’s the abstract:

Abstract: At least since the middle of the twentieth century, philosophers have tended to identify weakness of will with akrasia—i.e. acting, or having a disposition to act, contrary to one‘s judgments about what is best for one to do. However, there has been some recent debate about whether this captures the ordinary notion of weakness of will. Richard Holton (1999, 2009) claims that it doesn’t, while Alfred Mele (forthcoming) argues that, to a certain extent, it does. As Mele recognizes, the question about an ordinary concept here is one apt for empirical investigation. Our plan is to evaluate Mele’s studies and report some experiments of our own in order to investigate what in the world the ordinary concept of weakness of will is. We conclude that neither Mele nor Holton (previously) was quite right and offer a tentative proposal of our own: the ordinary notion is more like a prototype or cluster concept.

This is the extended version of a paper I’ll be presenting at the Pacific APA later this month in San Francisco.

Review of A Very Bad Wizard

Josh May — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 18:33:50 +0000

I read Tamler Sommer’s new book, A Very Bad Wizard: Morality behind the Curtain, recently and really liked it. So I wrote a short review of it for Metapsychology. It’s posted here, open access and all:

http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=book&id=5317&cn=135

I highly recommend the book, though I do complain a bit about some of its pessimistic aspects.

UPDATE: The review got linked on the front page of Arts & Letters Daily on 1/25/10. Pretty cool.

RPP Article Open Access

Josh May — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 18:14:02 +0000

I just set up the details for publication of an article (“Practical Interests, Relevant Alternatives, and Knowledge Attributions”) I and my fellow co-authors have coming out in the Review of Philosophy and Psychology. Springer, like many journals now, has an option for the authors to pay to have the article open access so it’s free for everyone to read. I was aware of this option but not that they have agreements with some libraries in which the libraries pay for the article to be open access. Luckily, UCSB is one of them. So the article will be free to all and I didn’t have to pay, which is nice since open access costs around $3,000! This also means I didn’t have to transfer the copyright either. All very cool!

Update: Here’s the link to the open access article on Springer’s site (no page numbers yet because it’s only currently published online, not yet in print):

http://www.springerlink.com/content/v046t12463667676/fulltext.pdf

Outstanding Graduate Student Paper Prize!

Josh May — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 02:43:06 +0000

I just found out that I got an Outstanding Graduate Student Paper Prize from the American Philosophical Association for the paper I’ll be presenting at the Pacific Division Meeting! And it comes with a travel stipend!

Again I found the email in my junk/spam mail folder. It’s starting to look like that folder is not filled with junk or spam!

Paper Accepted at Pacific APA

Josh May — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 01:26:52 +0000

I just got word that my paper “What in the World Is Weakness of Will?” (latest abstract available on this page) has been accepted for presentation at a colloquium session at the next meeting of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association (APA)! The meeting takes place in San Francisco March 31 – April 4, 2010 at Westin St Francis.

The funny thing is… I found the acceptance email in my junk mail folder in Gmail. And I hardly ever check that folder. I just happened to check it because I accidentally marked an email as junk and went to the folder to un-junk it. I wonder what would have happened if I never looked in that junk mail folder…

UPDATE: The Main Program is now online.

Pacific APA Special Session

Josh May — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 02:33:52 +0000

I’ll be presenting something for this session. Here’s the tentative program so far:

“Experimental Philosophy in the Classroom”
Special Session Sponsored by the APA Committee on the Teaching of Philosophy

SESSION CHAIR
Alexandra Bradner
Denison University

“EXPERIMENTAL PHILOSOPHY IN INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY:
OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES”
Emily Esch
College of St. Benedict/St. John’s University
Chris Weigel
Utah Valley University

“POLLING AS PEDAGOGY: EXPERIMENTAL PHILOSOPHY IN A METAPHYSICS COURSE”
Kevin Timpe
Northwest Nazarene University

“TEACHING AESTHETICS WITH EXPERIMENTAL PHILOSOPHY”
Richard Kamber
The College of New Jersey

“PHILOSOPHY 101 AND EXPERIMENTAL PHILOSOPHY”
Joshua May
University of California, Santa Barbara

COMMENTATOR (ON ALL FOUR PRESENTATIONS)
Eddy Nahmias
Georgia State University

UPDATE: The Main Program is now online.

Buffalo & Fredonia Trip

Josh May — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 22:40:58 +0000

So I’m back from my trip to SUNY Buffalo and SUNY Fredonia (both in NY). I had a great time! At both places I presented the paper I’m working on with Richard Holton, which is tentatively titled “What in the World is Weakness of Will?”. The first was a conference in Buffalo on X-phi:

http://eerg.buffalo.edu/program.htm

The second was a talk at Fredonia for their Philosophical Society:

http://www.andrewcullison.com/2009/10/josh-may-presenting-on-weakness-of-will-this-monday/

I received great feedback and had a wonderful time meeting new people and catching up with old friends.

New IEP Feature

Josh May — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 17:37:12 +0000

We’ve implemented a new feature at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: printer-friendly versions of articles. Check it out on this article, for example:

http://www.iep.utm.edu/contextu/

The link is on the right side on the sidebar.