Come have a cup of tea (or other beverage of your choice), hoist a cookie, lift your pinky, and opine about matters moral and metaphysical. We’ll meet in the LPCS conference room, which can be found through the main office (Main 204), or through the door at the north end of the hall on the second floor of Main. All are welcome!
Author: Huenemann
Justin Clark on Plato
Our own Justin Clark will be presenting a lecture on Plato – Friday, 2:30 p.m., in Family Life 301. All are welcome! (Justin is practicing for a talk he will be giving at another university.) ROOM CHANGE: now in FL 307
How would people really behave in the trolley problem situation?
The engaging Michael Stevens runs a psychological experiment – and the video is as instructive about the ethics of running psychological experiments as it is about human responses to moral dilemmas. An excellent documentary!
Closing the American mind, 30 years later
In anticipation of the “Snowflakes” discussion on Thursday, here is an insightful essay on the legacy of Allan Bloom’s 1987 The Closing of the American Mind. An excerpt:
For a democracy to thrive, talented youngsters had to be exposed to a philosophical education that allowed them to transcend the “bourgeois vulgarity” of their surroundings, and to devote themselves to something other than mere self-advancement. If American society could not ensure this, it risked descending into rule by elites who were no better than the uneducated mob, and for this reason perhaps far more dangerous (such was apparently his assessment of the graduates of MBA programs). As a result, Bloom believed that a “crisis of liberal education” would amount to nothing less than “the crisis of our civilization.”
Panel discussion THURSDAY: Are students snowflakes?
Erica Holberg, Charlie Huenemann, and Harrison Kleiner will be presenting. The basic question has to do with the tension between the value we place on free speech on college campuses and the interest we have in defending campuses (and students) against speech whose primary aim is to incite hatred and division. Thursday, 11/30, 4 p.m., HH 322, all are welcome!
