So, if you haven’t been keeping track, as I have, Thomas Nagel (a
once very well-regarded and respected philosopher of mind, morals,
and ethics) put his foot squarely in his mouth
the other day by nominating Stephen C. Meyer’s Signature in the Cell
for his “Book of the Year.” Meyer, as you may well know, is a fellow
of the Discovery [sic] Institute, and Signature is a work all about
how evolution doesn’t adequately explain the beginning of life (a claim
which is either vacuously true or very, very false, depending on how it’s
read).
Now, I could deploy a nice summary of somerecentresearch
on abiogenesis, or I could draw up some
nice pretty pictures
of the RNA world, and hope that Nagel runs into them. But other people have
(obviously) already done this, all over the internet, and Nagel doesn’t
seem to care one way or another. So I could head to the meta-level, and
write about what the Discovery Institute is really trying to do, and how
as public intellectuals, philosophers have a responsibility to do better
than play into the hollow work of pseudo-scientists, creationists, evangelicals,
and fundamentalists attempting to erode science and intellectualism on
a broad, national scale.
But Brian Leiter has already beat me to the punch.
This is a really nice piece detailing, for those in the profession not
familiar with the struggle occurring in public education these days (Support the NCSE!),
what’s happening and why this is about more than the fact that Tom Nagel
doesn’t know any biology. Worth a read.
New Website Hosting
Welcome to a brand new website and blog! This is a brand-new setup, running
on a new hosting service
(NearlyFreeSpeech.net), with a new blog
platform (blosxom). I’ve brought a few of
the most important entries from the old blog over to the new blog, but in
general most of the content is now permanently-archived over at the old
URL. New content coming soon!
So, this is essentially the saga of how I typeset my Princeton undergraduate
senior thesis. Several people have expressed interest in seeing how it was
done, so I figured I’d write up my collected wisdom as an article here. I’ll
present this material as an annotated version of the document preamble.
For my PHI 340 at Princeton, I found myself needing to typeset lots of
tableaux-style proofs in the style of our textbook, Possibilities and
Paradox, An Introduction to Modal and Many-Valued Logic by Beall and van
Fraassen. The same sorts of tableaux proofs appear in Tomassi’s
Logic. Here’s a tutorial teaching you how to typeset them in LaTeX, using a
couple of freely-available packages.
So you want to typeset a document with lots of math, and you don’t want it to
look like x + y^2 = 4z. No, you actually want it to look like your
textbook. Well, you’re in luck. In all likelihood, the program the authors of
your textbook used to write it is a handy little tool called LaTeX
(‘LAY-tech’). There’s all sorts of history here involving LaTeX’s author
(Knuth), the programming of TeX, the book that is the TeX source code (yes,
the entire source code to TeX is actually a book that you can buy), but that’s
for another time and place. Or some kind of computer science lecture or
something. You just want to draw pretty integrals, right? Right. So let’s get
to it.
I was late getting into Chicago due to a crazy snowstorm, so I only managed to
catch the last bit of a morning session on experimental philosophy and
naturalism, mostly filled with a talk that was at great pains to establish the
following two uncontroversial claims: (i) occasionally, philosophical
naturalists speak loosely, which might lead one to believe that they thought
that ID and its ilk (‘God Hypotheses’) were actually scientific, and (ii) if
one actually does think that such God Hypotheses are scientific, then one is
being self-contradictory in espousing philosophical naturalism. In point of
fact, I agree with both. Of course, there hasn’t yet been presented a God
Hypothesis that actually is scientific, so as of yet the argument is moot.