Thursday, January 01, 2015

Writings of 2014

I guess it's a tradition for me now, posting a retrospect of the past year's writings on New Year's Day. (Here are the retrospects of 2012 and 2013.)

Two notable things this past year were (a.) several essays on a topic that is new to me: skeptical epistemology of metaphysics ("The crazyist metaphysics of mind", "If materialism is true, the United States is probably conscious", "1% skepticism", "Experimental evidence for the existence of an external world"); and (b.) a few pieces of philosophical science fiction, a genre in which I had only published one co-authored piece before 2014. These two new projects are related: one important philosophical function of science fiction is to enliven metaphysical possibilities that one might not otherwise have taken seriously, thus opening up more things to be undecided among.

Of course I also continued to work on some of my other favorite topics: self-knowledge, moral psychology, the nature of attitudes, the moral behavior of ethicists. Spreading myself a bit thin, perhaps!

Non-fiction appearing in print in 2014:

Non-fiction finished and forthcoming:
Non-fiction in draft and circulating:
Some favorite blog posts:
Fiction:
  • What kelp remembers”, Weird Tales: Flashes of Weirdness series, #1, April 14, 2014.
  • The tyrant’s headache”, Sci Phi Journal, issue 3. [appeared Dec. 2014, dated Jan. 2015]
  • Out of the jar”, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction [forthcoming].
  • “Momentary sage” The Dark [forthcoming].
  • (reprint) “Reinstalling Eden” (first author, with R. Scott Bakker), in S. Schneider, ed., Science Fiction and Philosophy, 2nd ed. (Wiley-Blackwell) [forthcoming].
(I also published a couple of poems, and I have several science fiction stories in draft. If you're interested to see any of these, feel free to email me.)

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