I’ve just reformatted my old Laissez Faire Books columns (well, most of them — a few left to do) and linked them from the Essays page. Also, after a few months working at a public policy tank started making me question my long term career plans (viz., joining the professoriat), picking up Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language reminded me why I love analytic philosophy. So I threw up an old piece from the NYU days which I think presents a decisive objection to Stephen Neale’s attempt to salvage Bertrand Russell’s analysis of the semantics of “the” phrases. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, don’t bother with the piece; I don’t really explain it there either.) Though this also reminds me how silly I felt coming home from class, having my then-girlfriend ask what we’d been working on, and having to say “oh, we’re in week three of analyzing the semantics of ‘the.'” Ah, academia.