Josh May » philosophy

Sympoze: Digg for Academics

Josh May — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 06:15:11 +0000

Sympoze just opened up to all of academia, not just philosophy. It’s a site that works like Digg (or reddit and other “social bookmarking” websites), but is just for academics. It’s still just getting going, but it could really thrive if people get registered and start using it. So spread the word!

UPDATE: You can now add stories directly from Google Reader! (It’s way easy.)

Philosophy Apps for iPhone

Josh May — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 02:06:14 +0000

I recently found some decent apps for philosophy on the iPhone. Here are some free ones:

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (by SEP)
Ask Philosophers (AskPhil) (by Amherst College)
The Republic by Plato (by IndiaNIC, LLC)
The Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle (by IndiaNIC, LLC)
Stanza (by Lexcycle)

Here are some non-free ones:

Philosophy Bites ($2.99; forgot about this one in the original post)
Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy – by Simon Blackburn ($14.99)

The first one, obviously, is the one more likely to be frequently valuable to philosophers. I’m quite surprised I hadn’t previously heard that the SEP has an iPhone app! Click on the links to learn about the others (just cancel the iTunes pop-up if you just want to read about them in your browser).

Any others I’m missing?

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.

Three Minute Philosophy

Josh May — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 23:09:20 +0000

These “Three Minute Philosophy” videos are pretty funny. The Descartes one is especially fun:

You can find more (like ones on Aristotle, Hume, and others) on YouTube.

Knobe and Baumeister on Free Will

Josh May — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 21:11:40 +0000

Philosopher Josh Knobe and psychologist Roy Baumester discuss (via webcam) self-control and other phenomena related to free will:

Science Saturday: Holding Back

Very cool video from Bloggingheads.tv.

DeRose on X-Phi & Bank Cases

Josh May — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 19:44:25 +0000

Keith DeRose (Yale) has posted a link on Certain Doubts to a very interesting paper of his on the recent experimental work done on contextualism and related views: “Contextualism, Contrastivism, and X-Phi Surveys”

In short, DeRose attempts to argue that the empirical results (including ones I’ve reported with some people) don’t undermine the ordinary language basis for contextualism. A nice discussion is ensuing on the blog.

Discussion of Weakness of Will

Josh May — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 16:19:17 +0000

Joshua Knobe kindly put up a post on the Flickers of Freedom blog about my paper with Richard Holton on weakness of will. A fine discussion is ensuing over there!

Baby Moral Psychology

Josh May — Thu, 06 May 2010 22:49:40 +0000

Paul Bloom (Psychology, Yale) has written a nice piece in the NY Times about the moral behavior of young children:

“The Moral Life of Babies”

The video down the page a bit is pretty neato too.

Does Moral Action Depend on Reasoning?

Josh May — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 18:24:42 +0000

A very cool discussion among philosophers, scientists, and more sponsored by the Templeton Foundation here:

http://www.templeton.org/reason/

Dropbox Awesomeness

Josh May — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 15:43:56 +0000

I’ve been using Dropbox seriously since around the beginning of 2010, and I love it. I wish I had been using it sooner. It’s especially helpful for me because I have a desktop, laptop, and iPhone. Now I have access to all my files (all synced) on all these devices. And even if I’m not on my own computer, I can log into my Dropbox account on their website and access any of my files. You can also easily share files with people by sharing folders.

All in all, this is turning out to be an extremely helpful tool especially for academics, students, etc. If you want to learn more, I suggest watching the intro video they have.

(Note: If you do end up creating an account through that link, it will give me more free space! But of course I’m not just promoting it for the free space from referrals—it’s not really that much. I just think it’s a really cool program.)