To her immense surprise Laurie discovered a blog entry about her recent paper Logical Parts [pdf], which just came out in Nous. Wo’s Weblog has no fewer than five distinct objections to Laurie’s views, which I’m afraid is just the sort of thing she thrives on. Brian Weatherson, at Brown, also has a mention of it. Be warned: despite the generally clear prose, analytic metaphysics is a somewhat technical world. Laurie’s paper, for example, goes from “In my office, I have a large, comfortable red chair” to “allow any (nonempty) collection of properties to compose a fusion, but distinguish the fusions that are objects by defining a primitive predicate which as a matter of contingent fact applies only to fusions that are actual and to no other fusions” in less than three pages.

I’m not sure what I think of increasing the number of analytic philosophers with blogs. Especially the metaphysics people. They know way too much about logic, truth conditions, validity and all kinds of other stuff people don’t pay much attention to in blogworld. On the other hand, they tend to be quite unbelieveably contentious, which should go over well.