In a recent post, I commented on the recent hire of a foreign candidate for a philosophy job at the University of Parma, Italy. The hire of a foreigner, without “connections,” in Italian academia is almost unheard of.I just discovered that the search committee was chaired by Tito Magri, of …
Below is a call for papers for a conference on computer simulations. Although philosophers of mind have talked a lot about computer simulations (Turing test, anyone?), in my opinion they are very far from having reached the bottom on this important topic. I have written some of my opinions on …
Scott Sehon, Teleological Realism: Mind, Agency, and Explanation, MIT Press, 2005.Based on this review by Sarah Worley, Sehon’s book appears to be one of the latest installments in anti-naturalist philosophy of mind.From Kant to McDowell and beyond, there is a long tradition of philosophers who maintain that the mind as …
How do you choose wisely? Do you try to figure it all out at once, by consciously considering the pros and cons of every aspect of every option, or do you relax and patiently wait for the decision to pop into your head, already made by your unconscious mind? There …
Did you know of the dining philosophers’ problem? It’s a classic problem in computer science, where it is used to study the sharing of scarce resources among different processes. Five philosophers sit around the table, where they think and eat. (Isn’t that what philosophers do?) There is a fork between …
I’ve been told that a foreign candidate has been hired for a junior philosophy job at the University of Parma. The job offer was advertised a few months ago, in English, in an international philosophy listserv. To my knowledge, this is the first time this has happened in recent years.In …
Amos Elon, “A Shrine to Mussolini,” The New York Review of Books, Vol. 53, N. 3.Relevant personal background: I was born and raised in Italy but moved to the U.S. in 1996. Amos Elon is an Austrian Jew who immigrated to Palestine in 1933, became a major Israeli journalist and …
