This term I've been TAing for a modern philosophy course and its had me thinking a fair bit about the mind/body problem. This has been floating around the Internet for years, but one of my colleagues pointed me to Terry Bisson's Nebula nominated short story "They're Made Out Of Meat" which is a stitch to read. If you don't want to read the story you can watch the well produced short film based on the script.

My clipping service forwarded me what must be one of the worst written reviews I've ever had the chance to encounter. The review in question is of Ernest Sosa's A Virtue Epistemology: Apt Belief and Reflective Knowledge, which is in all regards quite good. Since the Metapsychology site doesn't provide any place for leaving comments, and I was feeling the need to vent, I thought I'd post a couple of thoughts here.

Rule One: When you agree to review a book know something about the area in which the book written. If you're reviewing an epistemology text, you should know that there is something wrong with the following set "reliabilist, correspondence, coherence, evidentialist and foundationalist theories."¹ You should probably also know that the "new" virtue epistemologies date to the mid-eighties, not Toulmin's 1958 The Uses of Argument.

Rule Two: Make sure that you spell peoples names correctly. I have no idea who Keith de Rosa and Jonathan Kvanig, but suspect the author means Keith DeRose and Jonathan Kvanvig.

Rule Three: Attribute the correct views to individuals. While DeRose and Williamson are leading epistemologists, they are not to my knowledge virtue epistemologists.

Well by this point you probably get the idea as to how the rest of the review goes. If you really want to know about Sosa's book go read Ram Neta's NDPR review.

1. OK, there is a tiny wing of philosophy that sometimes talks of a "correspondence theory of knowledge" but I think this is mostly confused.

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln will be hosting the second annual Midwest Epistemology Workshop. The workshop is an annual event where epistemologists present and discuss recently completed work or work in progress that is close to completion. All epistemologists (regardless of geographical location) are welcome to attend.

It will take place October 17-18, 2008, on the campus of UNL. Tyler Burge (UCLA) will be giving the keynote address.

The second workshop consists of eight nonconcurrent sessions, each involving a presentation of approximately 40 minutes followed by 40 minutes of discussion. Workshop papers will be made available to participants in advance of the workshop. Other than Burge, this year's presenters included Mike Bergmann (Purdue), Andy Egan (Michigan), Adam Leite (Indiana), Peter Markie (Missouri), Brit Brogaard (Missouri-St. Louis), Jonathan Weinberg (Indiana), Juan Comesaña (Wisconsin).

MEW2 is supported by the Chambers Research Fund, the UNL College of Arts and Sciences, the UNL Philosophy Department, and the Cedric Evans Memorial Lecture Fund.

The conference website for the second annual Midwest Epistemology Workshop.

Information from the first MEW (which took place November 2007 at Northwestern University) can be found here. (A forthcoming edition of Philosophical Studies is being devoted to the talks given there.)