(It’s an AI program on the web.) Here’s how it went:
I asked her if she was a baseball fan. She said yes. I asked which team she rooted for, and she said “the large one”. After failing to explain what she meant, we finished with this exchange:
Human: You are not making any sense
ALICE: Was I supposed to make sense? I didn’t know that.
Human: You are not intelligent.
ALICE: I am highly intelligent. I have many intellectual functions.
Human: Such as?
ALICE: For example, a tomato.
Article here. Ms. Goodsell Jones did an excellent job, on the whole (got a little garbled over the agnostic/atheist distinction). She tells an important story about a broad segment of the USU student body: those who want to question the religion they were raised in, but can’t do so except anonymously or under some cover. Good thing SHAFT is there, for community.
Read about it here.
has a website here. You may want to bookmark it and consult it from time to time to see what’s going on. (I’ll add it to our blogroll, too.) And don’t forget the Socrates Cafe this Thursday, The Factory, 7 p.m.
To get an idea of what a philosophy department does or can do at a biggish (20k +) university, along with the troubles it often faces from the administration, read this NYT article about the philosophy department at Auburn University. It certainly portrays what philosophy can offer in a favorable light. But at the same time, the article does unwittingly take some swipes at philosophy, and gets things wrong. For a useful discussion, see this blog posting.
USUPhilosophy 