Michael sort of beat me to this with his recent post on moral address, but following a precedent set last year (and duly Facebooked), Michael and I recently attended and presented papers at the 36th Annual Conference of the North American Society for Social Philosophy, held this time at the University of San Francisco. There we hung out and were feted by fellow PoTster David Potts.

No photo could really do justice to the view from Chez Potts, least of all one of mine (with the sun shining straight into my lens), but here’s a pathetic, lisping attempt, at several removes from Reality, intended to capture the westward view of Oakland and San Francisco from the hills east of there. Photographic trade-off: either take a picture looking straight into the sun, or wait for the sun to go down and for the fog to set in. Plato would have understood.

We also ran into a bunch of old friends at the conference, and made a couple of new ones, extending invitations to guest blog their NASSP papers here. So far, two (or four, counting Michael and me) have accepted.

Jason Lee Byas, who’s finishing up his dissertation at Michigan, will be blogging his NASSP paper, “The Meaning of Mass Incarceration.” And Jesse Spafford, finishing up at CUNY, will be blogging a paper on “Initial Appropriation and Duty-Creation,” itself a response to Bas Van der Vossen’s “Imposing Duties and Initial Appropriation,” Journal of Political Philosophy 23 (2015): 64-85.

Michael is already blogging his stuff on the justification of state legitimacy, and I will eventually blog my paper on police tailgating and the entrapment defense, the subject of a blog post I wrote a few months ago.

Within a week, inshallah, I’ll be blogging from Bethlehem, Birthplace of Our Lord Jesus, alternatively, the House of Meat (after the Canaanite fertility god, “Lehem”), and in general, just a nice, quiet vacation spot to spend the dog days of summer.

Still working out the timing on all this. Stay tuned.