80th Resolution

I would like to begin by thanking Patrick Gould and Virginia Wesleyan University for their wonderful hospitality.  As I understand, Patrick had to move heaven and earth to make this event possible (Patrick, please don’t dissuade me of your hard work as an administrator).  Thank you also to Charles Repp and Michael Jones for their fearless leadership in helping to organize this event.  And finally, thank you to all of the commenters, though I will not thank you each by name, this resolution would have been an even greater nonsensical mess of gibberish without your valuable contributions to my understanding of the talks presented this weekend. 

Part of the resolution is to identify the important work that has been done at the conference.  In a potential break with previous protocol, I would like to make this a deeply personal reflection.  But following Kaija Mortensen’s helpful advice, I’m hoping that by making this resolution a little stranger than usual, it will help us overcome our habitual patterns of thinking in order to see new theoretical possibilities. 

I also hope that Seth Goldwasser’s hylomorphic approach to Kant will help make the rest of this strange resolution a little more bearable.  He helpfully invites us to remember that “there’s always a lot more going on with Kant.”  So I invite you to use your imagination and apply it to the current manifold of experience to create a unified concept of me that includes the back side of Andrew Kissel and the front side of Brad Pitt.  On second thought, maybe include the back side of Brad Pitt as well. 

Don’t worry, no one should morally judge you for this kind of fantasy, so long as your fantasizing about Brad Pitt remains pure in the way helpfully elucidated by Miriam McCormick.  I’d also like to thank Miriam for the great accessibility of her wonderful talk.  It takes talent to make Blue Velvet accessible to the 8-year olds in the crowd, but I think the talk was a resounding success on that ground.

I feel that I have grown closer to all of you in these two days of philosophical reflection.  And without Chris Tucker’s helpful reminder that too much supererogation is both irrational and immoral, I probably would have found myself willing to jump on a grenade to prevent wonderful people like you from incurring even the slightest injury.  So thank you Chris for ensuring my continued personal safety.

I would then like to thank all the precisifications of Brannon McDaniel.  He gave me comfort to know that even when we all go our separate ways at the end of the day today, I’ll never be alone, as the Problem of the Many means there will always be many objects around me, even if I’m only a merely possible object and incapable of being a target of Millian reference. 

Of course, I’d like to thank Beau Branson for arguing that God’s omnipotence suggests that He must have (at least one) son.  It warms the cockles of my heart to know that although I am perfect, I need not be perfectly alone.

Thank you also to Louis Doulas for showing that it’s very difficult to pin down the representational fallacy.  I’m now reasonably confident that when I say, “Trust me, I am a perfect being,” I’m describing the way reality really is, not just reading ontological facts off of language in an illegitimate way.  

Of course, all of these speakers (myself included) would have you believe that the things they argue are true.  (Again, I am perfect.)  So I think it is best to thank Deborah Mayo last and to take seriously the Severe Test suggested by her Probative view: a claim C is not warranted unless something (a fair amount) has been done to probe the ways we could have been wrong about C.  

I thereby invite all of you here to joining me in thanking all of these people, and each other, though perhaps not for the same idiosyncratic reasons I have just laid before you.  I look forward to joining you all again next year at the 81st VPA after a long year of probing the ways we could be wrong on these, and all other, matters.