Amir Pnueli dies...

For those of you who may think "Who?" or "So What?"... Amir Pnueli was the guy who took Arthur Prior's Tense Logic (as in past, present or future tense) and developed a full fledged Temporal Logic. Non-Classical Logic is fun to work with but confounding as hell if you mess up (personal opinion).

Anyway, here is the announcement in the New York Times

The movement and spread of pop-intellectualism is a bit of a fascination for me. In my student days, Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was typically the philosophical work that most non-philosophers seemed to care about. That they mostly misread the work of a genuine intellectual was distressing. Lately, in an even more distressing trend, we have the verging on annoying reverence of the work of pop-intellectual Malcolm Gladwell. Some of you may have heard me discuss in class the relative merits and obvious mistakes of much of his gleening of real intellectual achievement and reflexively referring to his work seems to be the mark of acceptable opinion by too many politicians and self-appointed leaders of opinion. So we've gone from a true intellectual badly misintepreted to a pseudo-intellectual reflexively admired. Progress! Anyway, read here what someone who actually knows something of what Gladwell only shallowly and mistakenly glosses thinks of the situation.

Hi. I was wondering what's the biggest difference between your Phil 2 ,4 and 40 class and which ones are easier and which are harder. I took your Phil 2 class a while ago and I was interested to know how it differs from your other two classes. Thanks

Hi... I thought that I might just post a link to the Latest Sam Harris Article that has been published, for those who are into this sort of thing:

The Neural Correlates of Religious and Nonreligious Belief...

But, I see that the link button is not working here...

So, copy-paste this URL into your browser:

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0007272

Here is the follow up story about the South African Female Runner: http://sports.yahoo.com/top/news?slug=ys-intersexplight090913&prov=ap&type=lgns

Hi, is there anyone here who is in PHIL 40 class? I lost myhomework sheet for this week, can anyone tell me the alphabets for first puzzle please? Thank you!

Hi Professor Johnson,

I am interested in joining the Philosophy club but am not available on thursdays at 2:30. Is this always going to be the scheduled meeting time? Any chance of making it a little eariler? Say 12 or 1?

Christopher Harrell

the new layout looks really smooooth.. nice.