(LCR) A Blogging Low

Fewer than half the class participated to any degree in blogging for the course this week, which may be a new low. Apart from my disappointment about the loss of educational opportunity (the blogging you did was good quality), I'm concerned about course performance. Most of you can't really afford to give up the blogging points for the course, and yet some of you have seriously let it slide.

So I'll allow make-up blogging for LCR this coming week -- it's not required, but if you do it I'll count it towards your total blogging score.

(LCR) Krugman on Appeals to Authority

Here is a very sharp, short column by economist Paul Krugman, in which he discusses the virtues and limits of credentials. It well demonstrates, in case such demonstration were necessary, how widely applicable logical and epistemological principles are, even to practical matters such as economics. http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/19742-alan-greenspan-doing-his-best-to-make-things-worse

(LE) William Knox poem

The poem Miller mentions on p. 69 is evidently by William Knox (1789-1825). Here's a link: http://www.poetry-archive.com/k/oh_why_should_the_spirit.html

Camus at 100

In a piece on NPR this morning, I heard that the French/Algerian novelist and philosopher Albert Camus would be 100 years old today (he died at 46 in an automobile accident). A sidebar made an interesting point about Camus' retelling of the myth of Sisyphus and the paradox of boring employment. It's worth a listen:
http://www.npr.org/2013/11/07/243650305/why-do-people-agree-to-work-boring-jobs

(LCR) Midterm surprises

There were a couple of questions that many of you missed which surprised me. For example:
"'Thus,' 'since,' 'so,' and 'therefore' can all serve as conclusion indicators" is clearly false ('since' can only be a premise indicator). Yet all but one of you marked it "True."

Almost as many of you marked "True" the claim that "I was late because my car broke down" is an argument, the conclusion to which is "I was late." But the broken car is not offered as evidence for the truth of the claim "I was late" -- the fact of your lateness is a given, and the broken car is offered as an explanation.

Why Study Philosophy?

Here's a nice news story from Purdue University (where, as it happens, I got my Doctorate):
http://www.cla.purdue.edu/think/pages/2013/philosophical_conundrum.html

A New Low for Relativism