PhilGeek

Abstract
In the historical discourse about nature, especially about nature's relationship to gods, or God, the invocation of law as a way to  describe perceived order and regularity in the world of physical phenomena shows nearly continuously from Greek and Greco-Roman antiquity down to the 17th century.  Asking the question Where the Laws of Nature were before Nature is meant to dislodge the discussion of the "laws of nature" from the mostly Greco-Roman period and later Greek and Latin sources that speak explicitly in those terms, and to bring within the framework and history of this concept cuneiform evidence from the 2nd and 1st millennia B.C.E. that does not speak of nature at all, indeed has no terminology equivalent to "nature" in its vocabulary.  Whereas the cuneiform corpus altogether lacks a lexical counterpart to the word or the conception "nature," and thus, strictly speaking, belongs prior to and outside the bounds of the western discourse about nature, that is to say, it is literally "before natu

PhilGeek

The primary object of sight is the visible. What is visible is
either color or ``a certain kind of object which can be described
in words but which has no single name'' (\emph{De Anima} \textsc{ii}.7
418\( ^{b} \)4). So color is \emph{a} primary object of sight not
\emph{the} primary object of sight. That a sense can have a plurality
of primary objects is consistent with Aristotle's two defining
conditions on being a primary object---that it be perceptible to
one sense alone and about whose presence no error is possible.
Distinct kinds of objects can each satisfy these conditions. So it
does not follow from Aristotle's definition of primary objects that

PhilGeek

\begin{figure}[ht]
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PhilGeek

\title{Epistemic Modals in Context\thanks{Thanks to Keith DeRose,Kai von Fintel, Ernie Lepore, Jason Stanley and especially Tamar Szab\'{o} Gendler and John MacFarlane for helpful discussions and suggestions for improvement.}}
\author{Andy Egan, John Hawthorne and Brian Weatherson}
\date{August 2004}

PhilGeek

Dear Professor Palmowski,

We the undersigned are writing to you to express our shock at recent events at
King’s College. We are concerned with the drastic plans for the reorganization
of Humanities with a large number of redundancies. And in particular, we are
concerned at the news relating to our own disciplines: that Prof Shalom Lappin
and Dr Wilfried Meyer-Viol are to face compulsory redundancy as of autumn
2010, and that Prof Charles Travis is to be forced into retirement contrary to
the contract on which he was hired in 2005.

PhilGeek

The Head of the School of Humanities, Jan Palmorski, summoned
me to his office without warning yesterday evening to inform me that
King's has decided to "divest of computational linguistics", and so my
position would be redundant as of September. This is an incredible
development. Since moving back to Philosophy from Computer Science in
September 2005 I have been Director of Graduate Studies. I was
responsible, together with David Papineau, for formulating the
Department's RAE 2008 submission. As you know, The Department was ranked
third nationally in this research exercise. My monograph on intensional
logic and my articles were a significant part of this submission. I was

PhilGeek

I've been following some of the internet discussions about people's complaints
about journals. The recent thread on Brian Leiter's blog (http://bit.ly/dvZuC)
prompted a few thoughts. Tried to post them on the blog but for some reason it
was rejected. I didnt wan't to let this bit of structured procrastination
(http://bit.ly/LG7Z) go to waste, so ...

The Tasang & Frey paper which Chris Bertram links to
(http://www.iew.unizh.ch/wp/iewwp280.pdf) is very interesting and shows that
whatever problems there are with peer review are not unique to our discipline.
The 'accept as is' (i.e. no 'revise and re-submit') proposal in this paper is

PhilGeek

If someone else came from the moon in some extraodinary machine, like
Gonsales, and told us credible tales about his homeland, we would take him to
be a lunarian; and yet we might grant him the rights of a native and a citizen
in our society, as well as the title *man*, despite the fact that he was a
stranger to our globe; but if he asked to be baptized, and to be regarded as a
convert to our faith, I believe that we would see great disputes arising among
the theologians. And if relations were opened up between ourselves and these
planetary men--whom M. Huygens says are not much different from men here--the
problem would warrant calling an Ecumenical Council to determine whether we
should undertake the propagation of our faith in regions beyond our globe. No

PhilGeek

#!/bin/sh
#
# installgawk.sh
#
# A bash script to install the latest version of GNU awk. Be sure to set the variables to the desired values. 
#
# http://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/
#
# Mark Eli Kalderon 2008-03-22

PhilGeek

\definecolor{myblue}{rgb}{0.8,0.8,1}
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}\makeatother