The Sunday Cat discovers a philosophical problem

We note that the judge awarding the top prize to Sadie, a Scottish terrior, at the Westminster show this week said that she (Sadie) thinks highly of herself. Without wanting to be churlish, the Sunday Cat is surprised that Sadie can think highly of herself. After all, it is not clear that Sadie can think about herself. Or can she?

The jolly cnn video about Sadie has to be watched on youtube.

For people who can’t get the cnn video in their country (see comment #1), here is a much lower quality copy of it.

What would you change?

This post ended up posing two sets of questions.  The second is really irrelevant, but I wondered if anyone else can discover certain phrases running through their minds….

1.   The relevant question:  If there were one or  two things you could change about academia, what would it be?  Let’s make it general; perhaps you’d like to get rid of a specific person, but that’s not going to count.

When you give your answer,  please let us know your perspective.  Some recommendations looks quite different depending on their source.

In fact the question comes from another blog, but since I’m tempted to run over there to get their ideas, I thought I’d spare everyone the occasion for having a desire to sneak.  So the source will be revealed later.

There’s actually another question that arises from the last remark: 

2.  The irrelevant question:  Who or what stresses that one must avoid not just sin, but also the occasion for sin?  And just as one must not lead others into sin, one must not expose them to occasions for sin?

My self located mainly male speakers

In light of our Gendered Conference Campaign, I came across this conference on Self-Locating Beliefs, where all eight speakers are male.

The aim of this two-leg conference is to bring together researchers working on the de se on the two sides of the Atlantic; speakers will include both faculty and graduate students. The conference is wide-ranging in scope: talks will touch on issues in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, metaphysics and epistemology.

The first part of this event was held and MIT and there they did have women speakers.

It doesn’t strike me as an overly male-dominated field, but I might be wrong. Shall I send them the E-mail?

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Update: one of the speakers is a woman. I guess I will let them off the hook then.