On the Pacific APA

Welcome home to everyone who attended the Pacific APA -- I just got home a short while ago myself.  I had an excellent time and saw some really interesting papers presented.  But, as always, I had to miss a few sessions that I really wanted to go to, so let me take this opportunity to invite others to report back about interesting sessions that they heard at the APA.

I'd be especially interested to hear about two sessions in particular that I had to miss -- the Author-Meets-Critics session on Randy Clarke's book, and Kevin Timpe's symposium on source incompatibilism.  (Although, since Kevin will be giving that paper at the INPC this weekend, maybe he wouldn't want to spoil the surprise.)

P.S. -- On Thursday night I got to attend a live taping of John Perry and Ken Taylor's radio show, Philosophy Talk, and it was quite interesting.  The topic was The Future of Philosophy with guests Brian Weatherson, Liz Harman, and Sean Kelly.  Hopefully they'll have the show up on their website soon.  When they do, I highly recommend it.

Comments

[Kevin Timpe]

Thanks, Neal. My session went great--so great, in fact, that I converted both Derk and Michael to libertarianism..... Oh wait, no that was just a dream. But oh what a nice one!

[Ken]

The APA philosophy talk episode probably won't be broadcast until sometime this summer, unfortunately. We schedule our shows by the quarter and we've already scheduled the current quarter.

We -- that is, our production staff, not Ken and John -- will edit the APA episode sometime in the not too distant future. But we won't put it up on the archive page until after it's been aired. (IF we put it up before our affiliates wouldn't like us very much.)

Plus I have to admit that we left ourselves an out with this one. If it had turned out that you couldn't do a good radio show with a crowd of academic philosophers as your questioners and audience, by not putting it on the schedule right away, we left ourselves the option of just not airing it at all. But we were all pleased that it did turn out to be good radio -- at times, very good radio. Especially after the first segment, which started a little slowly, it e went quite well. By the second segement, Liz, Brian, and Sean were really cooking. Plus, once the audience got involved it was really great.

I think our regular listeners -- most of whom are not philosophers at all -- will be impressed not just with Brian and Liz and Sean but also with the audience and with how articulate, smart, thoughtful and engaging professional philosophers as a group are and that we're not nearly as weird and other-wordly as the popular imagination would sometimes have us be.

Thanks to everybody who participated. We'll have to do something like it again sometime soon.

By the way, while we were in Portland, we also did a television version of Philosophy Talk from the studios of Oregon Public Broadcasting. That was an amazing experience. I don't know what OPB plans to do with it exactly or when they plan to do it. They are contemplating airing it on their stations throughout Oregon and then making it available as an on-demand viewing special. But they haven't made final decisions.