Author: Huenemann

What zombies mean to us

An excellent essay here by Davia Sills about the cultural space zombies occupy for us. Excerpt:

At the heart of the zombie metaphor lies our need to understand our own personhood: can we extract good from all that darkness? Can we come back from the depths of despair and retake the world of light? We still have our share of monsters, like the skulking, mindless killers on the long-running US TV series, The Walking Dead. But more and more, viewers want to see zombies such as R from Warm Bodies and Camille from Les revenants who are just as confused, angry and unsure about their place in the world as we are. The humanised zombie is an antidote to the ever-present threat of terrorists, school shooters, exotic pathogens and predators of all sorts because it offers the potential for us to understand those who are different from us. Sure, zombies with personalities crave human flesh, but the most evolved of them struggle to control themselves, either in memoriam of the person they were or for the sake of the human beings they now love.

Read the whole article.

Souls and moral character

Interesting essay here in Aeon about personal identity, the soul, and moral character. An excerpt:

Recent studies by the philosopher Shaun Nichols at the University of Arizona and myself support the view that the identity-conferring part of a person is his moral capacities. One of our experiments pays homage to Locke’s thought experiment by asking subjects which of a slew of traits a person would most likely take with him if his soul moved to a new body. Moral traits were considered more likely to survive a body swap than any other type of trait, mental or physical. Interestingly, certain types of memories – those involving people – were deemed fairly likely to survive the trip. But generic episodic memories, such as one’s commute to work, were not. People are not so much concerned with memory as with memory’s ability to connect us to others and our capacity for social action.

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”