You are certainly right about the quantity over quality phenomenon. But it is also a matter of what constitutes "quality". It is hard to say whether certain seminal essays would have made it into print today, but it does not seem that highly original, creative thought is an important criterion of academic publishing. That seems to be left to the relatively few journals that are more courageous than others. For example, it is notable how many of the most important essays in 20th century analytic philosophy appeared in Phil.Review, a journal with a distinct Wittgensteinian heritage. Here we find "Two Dogmas", "What Is it Like to Be a Bat?", Grice's "Meaning" and Rawls's "Two Concepts of Rules" - all in their own way both unusual in conception and revolutionary in implication. Quite a few other journals - I will avoid mentioning names but most philosophers could find their own examples - have become stodgy and predictable. They do not want to take chances. Perhaps they are afraid of something like the Aronowitz incident: failing to recognize the distinction between challenging intellectual novelty and outright nonsense. But for my money I would rather dine on a buffet of imperfect arguments with a few gems among them than be fed dry, logically correct and ultimately useless academic fodder.

I'm not sure what you think was cynical about my third point (it was actually a caveat, the points came earlier). My comments about people's egoism, perhaps? But I was not trying to give a complete picture of the human spirit, only the negative side of it that affects how we behave in certain situations. Regarding your point that publishing can serve as a sort of intellectual exercise, the way track stars or skiers might participate in races just to stay in shape, that's fine if everyone recognizes it for what it is. I'm not sure they do.

If my earlier points about the journal review process were "speculative", it is only in the sense that I cannot offer more than anecdotal evidence of how extensive the problem is. The examples I gave are drawn from direct personal experience, e.g., a reviewer offering an extremely intricate (and frankly off-target) counterexample to an original proposal I was defending; another who seemed to be completely unfamiliar with the literature to which I was addressing myself and therefore thought the piece was of no general interest; another who insisted that I should have referenced an article in an obscure collection he co-edited; etc. Similar experiences and many more have been related to me by colleagues over the years.

But two things can demonstrates the arbitrrariness of the process, even without such examples. One is that when you do get feedback from reviewers, they usually have very different issues with the paper; the defects that one sees are not important to the other. In one or two cases reviewers even suggested more or less contradictory modifications to my paper. Second, in so many cases, an article just keeps going through the revolving door to one journal after another, without substantial revision, until someone finally says "okay". One colleague said he sent an article to eight different journals in his field, all of whom said "No thanks", and finally as an act of desperation shipped it off to a leading journal he never expected to get into. You can guess how that story ends. So what happened at the first eight journals? I do understand that there may be other criteria than perceived quality that determine acceptance, but factoring that in, it is still a very arbitrary process.

You suggest that "cognitive science" is a vague term, but since you go on to use it I assume it is specific enough to be meaningful. Now, we should probably open a new thread if we are going to debate its merits, but I will restrict myself to your statement that "a number of excellent philosophers have fled philosophy departments" to work in cog sci departments. I guess you are not worried that characterizing them as "excellent" is a bit question-begging. But that aside, there is a broad question here as to what has more long-term value in the philosophy of mind, the contributions of, say, Wm. James, Wittgenstein, Ryle, Quine, Davidson, Putnam, Goodman and Searle, or that of the Churchlands, Dennett and the many who have followed them down that path. Cog sci, broadly construed, has been a program in philosophy since the early 19th century; J.S. Mill at mid-century said more or less what many would say 1 1/2 centuries later: show me that this can actually solve any philosophical problems and I'll believe, but until then let's keep doing philosophy. As for its offshoots in bioethics, I think they are extremely dangerous and ought to be resisted.

I did not mean to imply that cog sci is "quasi-scientific", but that approaching philosophical problems through cog sci is quasi-scientific. It is a science at the appropriate level for what it studies. Biology is a different kind of science than physics in the same sense that philosophy is a different kind of study of the mind than cog sci. And just as there are interesting and useful interesections of biology and physics, yet most progress in biology has little to gain from progress in physics, so there are useful interesections of philosophy of mind and brain science, though the former must for the most part carry on independently of the latter. But this means that efforts to make philosophy subservient to the sciences, which are already quite visible in the early 20th century (though there it was primarily the so-called "scientific method" rather than specific discoveries that captured the imagination) are overall reactionary, shutting down all sorts of philosophical programs in the march toward the next discovery about reticular nuclei or the amygdala.

I must admit I am far more distressed by this than by the departmental motion you identify in the direction of ethics, political and historical philosophy. I deeply believe in philosophy maintaining relevance to the culture and the world at large; from what I can tell, you have similar concerns. So an expanded emphasis on moral philosophy should not be a bad thing. If a lot of phil.mind folks want to get out of philosophy I'm perfectly happy; less so at the number of cog sci types who want to get into philosophy. I have a bookshelf packed with the work of people like Damasio and Pinker and Glynn and Llinas and a host of others, each of whom thinks they are ready to solve the mind-body problem or something similar with their knowledge of synapses and brain waves and whatnot. Bah, humbug, let 'em try. Better relevant philosophy than irrelevant scientific speculation.

Some years ago I started a blog called "Brain Scam", which I have unfortunately been unable to keep up in the way I had intended to do. (I still post to it occasionally. You can read the posts at http://brainscam.blogspot.com.) The idea was to track the popular expressions of cognitive science through news reports of various putative breakthroughs, combined with more in-depth critique of the philosophical and cog sci literature on consciousness and bioethics. I wish I had time to pursue it. But I have a full time job doing what you did - more or less (I'm in application development, not OS or sw engineering, and I don't try to publish in that field). That plus part-time teaching in philosophy, conferences, other blogs and web sites, and projects in music and literature keep me way too busy. When I am blessed like you with the opportunity to retire from the computer field I hope to take it up again.