Author: Huenemann

Interview with Grayling here. From the article:

… Grayling is almost certainly going to upset a lot of Christians, for what he has written is a secular bible. The Good Book mirrors the Bible in both form and language, and is, as its author says, “ambitious and hubristic – a distillation of the best that has been thought and said by people who’ve really experienced life, and thought about it”. Drawing on classical secular texts from east and west, Grayling has “done just what the Bible makers did with the sacred texts”, reworking them into a “great treasury of insight and consolation and inspiration and uplift and understanding in the great non-religious traditions of the world”. He has been working on his opus for several decades, and the result is an extravagantly erudite manifesto for rational thought.

Friday, November 11, 2010 � 10:00-2:00 p.m.
Oak Room, Student Center, Redwood Road Campus

We are thrilled to announce that this will be the FOURTH REGIONAL version of our Annual SLCC Student Philosophical Conference! The conference will consist of a one-hour plenary session featuring our keynote speaker Dr. Charlie Huenemann then a two-hour panel session. We are currently seeking undergraduate students to present papers at these breakout panels. These panels will be conducted and moderated by SLCC and/or visiting professors. Each student will read their paper (maximum of 15 minutes), after which a discussion/Q & A will take place.

Because we want to include as many participants as possible, we hope to have 5-7 papers presented at each panel. Additionally, the papers may be broader in scope than just Friedrich alone and need not be exclusive to our conference (enabling students to present at more than one conference). The deadlines are as follows: October 1, 2011 for Abstracts and October 31, 2011 for final papers. (Please email your completed Paper Submission Form to SLCCPhilosophyConference.)

Conference website here.

Here’s a review in the Guardian of Gary Gutting’s book Thinking the Impossible: French Philosophy Since 1960. An excerpt:

… [Y]ou don’t speak language. Language speaks you. You might think of speech or writing as ways of expressing what’s on your mind or in your heart but all you’re really doing is mouthing the cliches that linguistic structures (and strictures) permit. Marx said man was alienated from his nature. Freud said man was alienated from his desires. But for the post-structuralists, the very idea of man was itself alienating. Had Descartes really had a self, he’d have been kidding it when he said, “I think, therefore I am”. “I think, therefore I am being thought” is nearer to the deconstructionist mark. Or as Derrida more famously put it, “There is nothing outside the text”.

But was there anything inside the texts of Derrida and his fellow deconstructionists? ….

See them on the “Course Info” tab, or here.

Philip Kitcher, a prominent philosopher at Columbia, recently published his own recommendation for philosophy to re-orient itself. You can get a pdf of his article here. The basic problem is that, like all disciplines, philosophers tend toward ever-increasing specialization, and so their audience shrinks and shrinks. When they try then to argue for the importance of what they’re doing, they face a difficult question: if what they are doing is so important, how come no one other than themselves is interested in it? They can shout, “It IS important!”, but the louder they have to shout, the less convincing their message is.

Instead, Kitcher takes a cue from John Dewey: ‘‘If we are willing to conceive education as the process of forming fundamental dispositions, intellectual and emotional, toward nature and fellow men, philosophy may even be defined as the general theory of education’’. Philosophy, he thinks, and even “academic” philosophy, needs to engage the real questions and problems not just of specialists, but of educated people across a wide bandwidth.

Here’s Kitcher’s own vision:

…[S]ocieties and individuals continue to need an integrated picture of nature that combines the contributions of different areas of inquiry, and different fields of investigation can be assisted by thinkers whose more synthetic perspective can alert them to missed opportunities and provide them with needed clarification. Along the value-axis, philosophy can offer an account of ethics as an evolving practice, one that has probably occupied our species for most of its history, and that has been variously distorted by claims to expertise that are based on alleged religious revelations or on supposed a priori reasoning. They can seek, as Dewey recommended, methods for advancing the ethical project more ‘‘intelligently.’’ In light of this account, using whatever methodological advice can be garnered from it, they can identify the points in current ethical, social, and political practice where tensions and difficulties arise, attempting to facilitate discussions that will lead to progressive shifts.

So I think what this means is that philosophers should attempt to both clarify and question the developments in the sciences, business, politics, and arts, from the vantage-point of a broadly educated person. They should be the ones taking the long view, as it were.

Kitcher’s short article is well worth reading and reflecting on, I think.