Monday, February 16, 2009

Best and worst conference presentations

Thanks to Chrono for the suggestion. I would very strongly urge you not to name graduate students or untenured faculty in the 'worst' category, for obvious reasons, though you could of course describe their talks without naming names.

Update: While we're on this topic, what does reading a paper as opposed to informally presenting it say about the speaker? Should first-timers start by reading the paper, or should they jump in the deep end right away?

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Kind of defeats the purpose of a "gossip" board, doesn't it? If I'm wrong, then at least be consistent and urge people to refrain from naming names of untenured faculty regardless of the discussion topic. (Posts about the survey in a previous thread come to mind. Isn't the author of that survey an assistant professor? Even Brian Leiter refrained from using his name on the LR before taking down the post entirely. Perhaps there is honor among thieves.)

Anonymous said...

Not best or worst, but...

I was at an APA session a few years ago. The speaker was an old and prominent political/moral philosopher. His talk got around to the Bush administration, and, not surprisingly, he was critical of much of their activity. However, in an aside, he did make this concession: "well, everyone likes a little bush now and then."

Anonymous said...

i attended a talk at the northwest philosophy conference in 2006 called "a plea for understanding." the argument roughly was: we don't know what knowledge is, so let's stop talking about it and start talking about understanding. question: do we understand what understanding is? answer: no, but that's no problem. it was quite poor.

the best talk i attended would have to be jonathan schaffer's at the pacific apa a couple years ago. "the least discerning and most promiscuous truthmaker." incredibly engaging, presented well, great ideas, and great comments by ross cameron. a close second would be laurie paul's at last year's pacific apa.

Anonymous said...

I don't know the name of the speaker, but I was at an awful presentation at this year's Eastern APA. It was on Frankfurt's moral responsibility stuff, and was what I'd expect from an undergrad writing on the topic - it pointed out one legitimate problem with Frankfurt's approach, but the proposed solution to that problem was incredibly naive, and led in an obvious way to a far bigger problem. What's worse is that all of this has been thoroughly addressed in the massive amount of literature that followed Frankfurt's initial work, but the paper engaged none of that literature. It makes me wonder who reviewed that paper for the APA, because anyone at all familiar with the area would have seen that the paper had absolutely nothing new (and not much that was plausible) to say.

Anonymous said...

Ummm, you doofs realise that even though you might not be name-droppin' you are providing enough info such that anyone with google and an enter button can find out the person's identity.

I won't name names but this idiot gave an idiotic paper at the Eastern APA titled "I am an Idiot". The session was Saturday at 2pm and here is a link to the un-named person's homepage.

How about you save this shit for the bars instead of the comments section of a trafficked blog.

Anonymous said...

I was at that Frankfurt paper! I thought it was great.

The only part I didn't like was during the questions when one guy kept whining about how the paper only pointed out one legitimate problem with Frankfurt's approach, and how the proposed solution to that problem was incredibly naive, and how it led in an obvious way to a far bigger problem.

I really got sick of it when he whined that all of this has been thoroughly addressed in the massive amount of literature that followed Frankfurt's initial work, and then whiningly added that the paper engaged none of that literature.

Other than that, it was a great session.

Anonymous said...

I would kill to attend any of Jon Schaffer's presentations; especially his fantastic paper you mentioned and his other one(s) on monism and spacetime.

/incredibly jealous

Anonymous said...

I need not, as you will see, say anything about the talk itself, for this was the thesis:
Women should practice martial arts b/c it will help them get out of bad relationships. And Aristotle would agree.

(I guess the Aristotle comment is what it made it something other than a paper on self-help.)