Neil Sinhababu: Zagreb!

Thursday, April 13, 2017

Zagreb!

Thanks to Matej Susnik for bringing me to Croatia! The Zagreb city center feels like the Slavic Europe of music videos, with stylish young people in tight black jeans walking past stately old buildings. I friended Matej on Facebook a few years ago when Google Scholar told me that he had discussed my work in Croatian. I ran his paper through Google Translate and was happy to see that he was bringing Humean ideas into a new language.

Yesterday after I laid out my naturalistic moral epistemology for the philosophy department, Matej organized a second talk on moral metaphysics at another venue. So I get to play with more philosophers, and I don't even have to go to a new city! Tonight will be the only night for nine days in which I sleep in the same country I slept in the night before. It's been Norway-Finland-Slovakia-Hungary-Croatia, and from today Croatia-Netherlands-North Sea-UK.

Philosophers in Zagreb have enemies who want to shut their department down for bad reasons. (For example, the philosophers discovered plagiarism in a government minister's work, and now the minister's friends want revenge.) I hope the department can survive and keep being awesome. I don't know how international support can help at this point, but we should be ready to provide it if needed.

Welcome to my blog! You can visit my homepage here if you like.

You can check out this fun philosophical interview I did in 2017 if you're interested in my views on a number of issues ranging from the Humean theory of motivation to romantic relationships with people from other possible worlds.

I've been blogging since 2004 at a number of different sites. Maybe this is a good place to show you the best posts from previous sites I've run.

One of the more interesting things I've made on the internet is a blog called "War or Car" that described things you could buy for the price of the Iraq War. I was running it for four months in 2008, through the Presidential election. You could buy every American household its own Toyota Prius -- hence the name of the blog. More amusingly, you could buy every living panda its own stealth bomber, and do a variety of other awesome whimsical things instead of killing a ridiculous number of people.

At my longtime personal blog, The Ethical Werewolf, I made a logic puzzle loosely based on Sir Mix-a-lot's "Baby Got Back". It occasionally gets tweeted or otherwise linked around for public amusement.

A few years ago, people at the Philosophers' Cocoon asked me to do a blog post for them about my job at the National University of Singapore. I'm still there today, and I like it!

In 2012 I ran a little site called VoteSeeing that ranked the accuracy of pundits trying to predict the Presidential election. Some nice people at a philosophy blog called NewAPPS asked me to post my results there. Daily Kos won, and Nate Silver took second place.

I did a guest post for Daily Nous on the undersupply of journal space. This is why rejection rates at good philosophy journals top 90%. I think a lot of good work isn't making into print, and can't be discussed by the community.

My color vision isn't very good, so I tried out some color vision glasses to try to see green. I was wondering whether I'd see a color I hadn't been able to imagine before, and I wrote about that for Amy Kind's imagination blog. I think the answer might be yes, though it's unclear.