Rolled out of Indiana in the back of a pickup truck

I am pleased to report that the Midsouth Philosophy Conference was a total success. We left Indiana on Thursday afternoon – I went with Jonathan, a junior professor in my department who does experimental philosophy and cognitive science, and Sharon, who’s really nice – technically she’s a firstyear like me, but she already has her Master’s. I spent most of the trip sleeping in the backseat. We stopped for dinner in Nashville, at the Loveless Café, where we had fried chicken, amazingly good sweet potatoes, and biscuits with sausage gravy, preserves, and sorghum. Sorghum’s pretty tasty – it’s like molasses only milder – but sausage gravy is terrifying, all white and lumpy. It heralds one’s immanent demise.

We stayed at Jonathan’s parents’ house in the Memphis suburbs. They were very hospitable – we got in around eleven and they were still up, and Jonathan’s mum was taking chocolate chip cookies out of the oven as we arrived. The next morning we slept in and when we woke up there were fresh orange blossom muffins, orange juice, and coffee.

The conference itself was very educational and went a long way towards demystifying the whole conference thing for me. Paul Boghossian gave the keynote address, which was on the naturalization of meaning. It would have been right in my wheelhouse if only I’d been able to hear him. Alas, it was one of only two talks in my area during the whole conference.

After the keynote, we all split up and went to different talks. I made the very poor decision of going to a talk on “Ironic Racial Humor” because race is interesting and I’d never heard of the philosophy of humor. (Apparently it’s a branch of aesthetics.) Honestly? I was hoping there’d be jokes. But as it turns out the only joke in the philosophy of humor is that there are no jokes in the philosophy of humor, except for this one. Which isn’t very funny. I found this talk, in which the speaker argued that “ironic racial humor” can somehow fight racism, actually kind of racist. It presupposed that it’s black people’s job to educate white people, and completely ignored the possibility that other black people might find such humor affirming or, you know, funny.

As a matter of fact, the talks given by my fellow Hoosiers were by far the best I attended. This may have been partially due to my poor choice of talks, although apart from the ironic racial humor talk, they all sounded like interesting ideas. But I went to a talk by a fellow who claimed that desire satisfaction is the only requirement for well being (then what is well being? Why, it’s what you get when your desires are satisfied! It cannot be cashed out in any other way! So the child molester who successfully molests children has well being, as does the person whose only desire is that there is a non-prime number of atoms in the universe (as long as that’s the case, whether or not he knows it’s the case), as does the person hooked up to the experience-machine. LAME.)

I would actually love to go on in this vein, criticizing the talks I attended, but it occurs to me that this is poor form, so I’ll stop. Suffice it to say that I could totally submit a paper to this conference, and next year I shall. This is something I can do.

Other highlights included a mighty nice pulled pork sandwich, cheese grits, talks on experimental philosophy, extended mind, and Kierkegaard, and a long, intense banter session with the Werewolf which culminated in one careless comment from me that brought our fragile rapport down like a house of cards. Just when I think the Werewolf and I have turned a corner, it turns out that we haven’t. It’s honestly weird to like and respect someone so much and yet be utterly unable to get along with him.

On Saturday Jonathan’s parents hosted a big party for the conference-goers, where those who were inclined watched the basketball game and the rest of us sat around the kitchen table and gossiped about our colleagues. We talked to a very congenial philosopher of logic from Mississippi who gave us tips on departmental politics and who made fun of me for my fangirlish love for Wittgenstein and Graham Priest. It was very entertaining.

So now I’m back in Bloomington, way behind on everything and planning to eat nothing but raw spinach and brown rice for a month, charged up and freshly determined that this philosophy thing is something I can by God own.