Philosophy@Utah State

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS – CHASS RESEARCH SYMPOSIUM

Attention all students! In an effort to provide more academic opportunities to the students in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, the CHaSS Student Council will be hosting a research symposium during CHaSS Week on Thursday, March 29 at 7:00 p.m. All kinds of research from all the departments in our college will be accepted. Please share your research with us and with your peers! Awards will also be given. Please send your 150 – 250 word Abstracts to: natalie.archibald@usu.edu by Friday, March 16.

῀῀῀῀῀῀῀῀῀῀῀῀῀῀῀῀῀῀῀῀῀῀῀῀῀῀῀῀῀῀῀῀῀῀῀῀῀῀῀῀῀῀
(I think this one is for faculty participation; but students may wish to attend the conference)

CALL FOR PAPERS – UTAH ACADEMY OF SCIENCES, ARTS, AND LETTERS

The Annual Conference of the Utah Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters will be held April 13, 2012 at Utah State University. Proposals for papers in all disciplines are welcome. Conference papers will be considered for publication in the refereed Journal of the Utah Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. Information for authors interested in submitting papers for publication in the Journal will be provided at the conference. Papers are also eligible for consideration for a cash award for the “Best Paper” awarded in each division. All presenters must be members of UASAL. Membership is $30 per year ($20 for students) which includes lunch at the annual conference and a copy of the journal. UASAL membership and conference registration forms are available here. Send title of paper or poster and a short abstract (150 words or less) by March 1, 2012 to the appropriate division chair. Be sure to include your mailing address, phone number, email address, and fax number. Pre-registration for the conference is recommended since the lunch reservation deadline is March 15, 2012. Same day registration will be available at an increased price; however, lunch may not be available for same day registrants. Please send the division chair for education your title, abstract, and other information to david_williams@byu.edu.

Sheryl WuDunn, Pulitzer Prize Winner and co-author of Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, will be giving a lecture on Tuesday, Feb. 28, 4:00-5:15 pm, in the Eccles Conference Center Auditorium. The lecture title is “Gender Oppression and an Individual’s Responsibility to Promote Social Justice.”

Here is an interesting article on what ails the humanities.  The claim is that humanities professors have inflicted a lot of damage on themselves.  The piece is rather optimistic about the public attitude toward humanities, one person remarking that “I don’t think our civilization is so degraded that we have to defend giving attention to what is excellent.”  The problem, rather, is two-fold.  The first problem is related to overspecialization and the popularity of various approaches (deconstruction, postmodernity, anti-colonialism, feminism, marxism) in the academy.  One fellow in the article noted that “What matters to the public is Shakespeare, not the ‘logic of theatrical representation.’”  Ordinary people recognize that Shakespeare is a value.  We are not so lost that we have to argue that great things deserve attention.  The problem is that humanities faculties too rarely teach the great things, and when they do it is without proper respect (they are busy just “deconstructing” them).  If that is your college exposure to Shakespeare,  you are going to either not take university faculty seriously, not take Shakespeare seriously, or perhaps both.

Related to this is the failure of humanities professors to speak Read the rest of this entry »

Come discuss philosophy generally (and property rights specifically) at The Factory Pizzeria, next Tuesday (2/28), 6:30! All are welcome.

Note: if you were planning to be happy without being virtuous, forget about it. And, yes, for crying out loud, a computer can have a mind.

Since Apple is soon shutting down MobileMe (which is how I used to host my blog) I have moved my blog.  The old blog will be up for just a while longer before it shuts down, but I have officially moved to saintsocratessociety.com.  The new blog is still pretty rough, but over the next week I hope to get it fully up to speed.

~ Kleiner

This just in:

Aporia, Brigham Young University’s undergraduate journal of philosophy, is pleased to announce that spring 2012 issue will extent submissions until February 13, 2012. Aporia is dedicated to recognizing exemplary philosophical work at the undergraduate level. The spring 2012 issue will be published in both an online and print edition. Papers can be submitted to aporia.byu@gmail.com.

Congratulations to Greg Esplin, a graduate of USU’s philosophy program, who just yesterday successfully defended his dissertation at Purdue University!

Here is a thoughtful and insightful review by Roger Scruton of some recent books that try to connect our values, evolution, and neuroscience. An excerpt:

We are human beings, certainly. But we are also persons. Human beings form a biological kind, and it is for science to describe that kind. Probably it will do so in the way that the evolutionary psychologists propose. But persons do not form a biological kind, or any other sort of natural kind. The concept of the person is shaped in another way, not by our attempt to explain things but by our attempt to understand, to interact, to hold to account, to relate. The “why?” of personal understanding is not the “why?” of scientific inference. And it is answered by conceptualising the world under the aspect of freedom and choice. People do what they do because of events in their brains. But when the brain is normal they also act for reasons, knowing what they are doing, and making themselves answerable for it.

And at the end:

But the theory of adaptation tells us as little about the meaning of “I” as it tells us about the validity of mathematics, the nature of scientific method or the value of music. To describe human traits as adaptations is not to say how we understand them. Even if we accept the claims of evolutionary psychology, therefore, the mystery of the human condition remains. This mystery is captured in a single question: how can one and the same thing be explained as an animal, and understood as a person?

I (Harrison Kleiner) have moved offices.  I am no longer in Main 341A; you can now find me in Main 311.  It is a miniature hobbit hole of an office, so don’t wear anything bulky if you come to see me.