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Friday, April 22, 3:30-4:20, Main 301: Philosophy: Meditations (Some Loud) on Good and Evil
Moderator: Huenemann
• William Holloway, “Übermensch: Wille zur Macht in Goethe’s Faust and Metal Music of the New Age”
• Michael Otteson, “God and the Devil: How They Differ”
• Eric Bottelbergh, “Animal Sufferings and the Goodness of God”

Same day, same room, 4:30-5:45: Philosophy: The Erotics of Philosophy, The Philosophy of Law
Moderator: Huenemann
• Carson Bessinger, “The Path of Purification Through Love: Platonic Eros and Sufi Mysticism”
• Daniel Tate, “Fractal Erotika: Apollodorus and the Introduction to Plato’s Symposium”
• Sahil Oberoi, “Understanding Liberty through Crime and Punishment”
• Shashank Chauhan, “Morality within Law: Legal Positivism vs. Natural Law”

This NY Times article discusses the lack of rigor in colleges of business.  Business majors spend less time studying than any other major and show the weakest gains in the first two years of college in writing and reasoning skills.  And get this – business majors score lower than every other major on the GMAT (the M.B.A. entrance exam)!  I guess they do have one brag – they pay more in tuition because of differential tuition costs.

So what should a student aspiring to a business career do?  Well, surveys of businesses show that they want employees who can think clearly and creatively, write coherently, and analyze data.  So you’d be just as well off majoring in the humanities or social sciences.  This might be one reason why most Ivy League schools don’t even have a business major for undergradutes.  Universities that have undergraduate business programs that are highly praised integrate history and philosophy into their curriculum.

It is really unfortunate that two classes meeting requirements for the Philosophy major – Early Modern and Metaphysics – are scheduled at the same time this coming fall. Believe me, we tried to avoid it. But we failed because of the extraordinary pressures on classroom space at the university. Basically, we could have avoided the conflict only by moving one of the classes to late in the day – after 4. Our guess was that this would inconvenience even a greater number of students.

Here’s what to do if you’re in a bind. If you are graduating in spring 2012, take Metaphysics in the fall, and then take Kant and the 19th Century in the spring. If you’re graduating in fall 2011, or for some reason that first idea won’t work for you, then meet with your advisor to see what can be worked out.

You can read the long version on Leiter’s blog, but here’s the shorter one. So Synthese, a highly-respected journal of philosophy, had some guest editors put together an edition on why arguments for intelligent design (ID) are so unscientific and shoddy. Then some vocal proponents of ID complained to the overall editors, who leaned particularly on one of the contributors, Barbara Forrest, to tone down her rhetoric. Eventually, the volume was published, with the overall editors inserting a prefatory “I’m sorry this is so unprofessional” note of apology. This has made many people in the academic community angry at Synthese‘s overall editors for not having the guts to stand by what they publish.

To my mind, it is sort of of curious to see so much fuss over this. I have read Forrest’s article, and I wouldn’t say it was unfair or unprofessional, though it is a rather long and tedious argument against a small group of shoddy thinkers who would be best ignored. I don’t respect ID enough to think it merits a high-handed smackdown in a scholarly journal. But – on the other hand – the topic of evolution vs. creationism in public schools is a significant one, so I can understand a group of scholars wanting to publicly expose ID’s faults and flaws. I wonder what sort of backlash the Synthese editors were fearing? Would it have been worse than what they’re getting? I doubt it.

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.