Author: Huenemann

Intermountain Philosophy Conference here Friday!

Professors from around the region will be here at USU this Friday afternoon to present and discuss their thoughts on various philosophical topics. All are welcome to attend any or all sessions. I’ll copy here a program of the events:

PROGRAM – Intermountain Philosophy Conference 2014(2)

12:15 – 1:00 – keynote address (Room 205):

“The Problem with Beginnings: Grasping at the Historical and

Psychological Origins of Patriarchy”

Professor Shannon Mussett, Utah Valley University

Time Room 201 Room 205 Room 207
1:00-1:30 Thi Nguyen (UVU), “How to find a moral expert” Nick Harrison (UU), “An Instrumentalist Application of Descartes’ Dualism” Aaron Kenna (UU), “The Generality of Precision: Imprecise Probabilities, Ignorance and the Weight of Evidence”
1:30-2:00 Ryan Nelson (UU), “Imaginative Resistance as a Puzzle for Moral Realism” Eric Stencil (UVU), “Descartes, Elizabeth and the Mind-Body Union” Michael M. Shaw (UVU), “Nietzsche and Empedocles on the Permanence of Nature”
2:00-2:30 Erica Holberg (USU), “The Unenlightened Sex: Kant, Feminism, and Culpable Failures of Moral Imagination” Kristopher G. Phillips (SUU), “Yet Another Paper on Descartes’s Argument for Mind-Body Dualism” Richard Sherlock (USU), “Religious Studies and the Question of Truth”
2:30-2:45 BREAK
2:45-3:15 Russell Wahl (ISU), “Russell’s Neutral Monism” Nobel Ang (ISU), “Spirited impetuosity or impetuous spiritedness?Aakrasia and related phenomena in Nicomachean Ethics Bk VII” Anthony P. Smith (UU), “Breathing Life into Death: A Metabolic Definition of Death
3:15-3:45 Gordon B. Mower (BYU), “Hume’s Theory of Property” Daniel W. Graham (BYU), “Socrates as a Deontologist” Kara Barnette (Westminster), “Atoning for the Irrevocable”
3:45-4:15 Karen Mizell (UVU), “The Epistemology of Imagination and Play in the Community of Inquiry” Harrison Kleiner (USU), “Myth, Moral Education, and the Liberal Arts” [Plato] William McCurdy (ISU), “Charles Sanders Peirce is Not a Pragmatist:

Santiago’s Aristoteleanism“
4:15-4:45 Anne Peterson (UU), “Aristotle’s Physics II.8: Coincidence, Empedocles, and Evolutionary Theory “ Dan Molter (UU), “Defining the reference class: evolutionarily significant individuals in evolutionarily relevant situations” Travis Anderson (BYU), “Frankfurt and Heidegger on the Things We Care About”

Philosofoosball?

In case you’re interested –
You and your students are cordially invited to join us for our 2nd Annual USU Foosball Tournament!! BIGGER & BETTER than last year. We have two new, high-quality Tornado 3000 foosball tables (thanks to our sponsors Dean John Allen and James Morales). Please spread the word to your students:
Event: 2nd Annual USU Foosball Tournament
When? Tuesday, November 18th at 6:00 pm
Where? 3rd floor, Taggart Student Center
Registration fee: $3 per player (this includes free food and drinks sponsored by Buffalo Wild Wings). We are playing doubles but one can also sign up individually and pay at the door
Registration: claudia.schwabe@usu.edu or phone 435-881-4574
Everyone is welcome: Students, Staff, Faculty, etc.
Find us on FACEBOOK! (USU FOOSBALL CLUB)
Prizes for 1st place ($50 and trophy), 2nd place ($30 vouchers), and 3rd place ($20 vouchers)

SLCC Student Philosophy Conference

If you are looking for some philosophical stimulation, you might check out Salt Lake Community College’s philosophy conference next week, which will focus on Nietzsche’s philosophy. USU’s own Dan Alexander and Alex Tarbet will be presenting on Friday, and I will be presenting on Thursday. The conference will also feature a number of Nietzsche scholars from around the world, as well as a wide range of student presentations. (If you have class on these days, you might try this ploy on your professors: “Don’t you think part of my undergraduate education should involve the exciting give-and-take of discussion with my peers in academic settings?” But if you use this ploy, you damn well better show up!)

So how much do you know about Aztec metaphysics?

“In chapter three Maffie introduces the “fundamental premise” of Aztec metaphysics, which he calls inamic agonistic unity. Teotl, Maffie claims, is defined by

the continual and continuous cyclical struggle (agon) of paired opposites, polarities, or dualities. Agonistic inamic unity refers to a brute fact about the nature of teotl and hence a brute fact about the nature of reality per se. . . . Teotl’s ceaseless self-becoming, self-presenting, and self-unfolding, and therefore its ceaseless generating and regenerating of the cosmos, are defined by agonistic inamic unity. (137)

“Night and day, male and female, life and death, warp and weft, wind and fire, wet and dry, flower and flint stone, weakness and strength, order and disorder or being and non-being are just a few of the countless opposites that struggle for dominance. Indeed, all things, processes, forces, powers, influences, or energies-in-motion have an inamic match that they complete, complement, and compete with. More accurately, all things have multiple matches, which indicates one of the ways in which teotl is ineliminably ambiguous. For example, a person is both male (vis-à-vis his wife) and female (vis-à-vis his enemy), both dead and alive, both weak and strong, etc. Importantly, no inamic half ever triumphs over the other, for both opposites are necessary for the existence of the pair. There is no death without life, for instance, even though death and life constantly struggle to dominate each other.”

Read a review of James Maffie’s Aztec Philosophy.