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Those of you signed up for PHIL 3100 can get a head start by viewing this:

Here is a book review of Michael Ruse’s Science and Spirituality, which he argues that the core of Christianity is consistent with contemporary scientific conclusions. The reviewer’s interesting conclusion:

My own suspicion is that it is not so easy to divide the spheres of faith and reason. It takes considerable faith, for example, to believe that the very same laws of nature apply throughout reality and that those laws are remotely accessible to the human mind (a problem Ruse insists that “the Victorians” would not have noticed — forgetting that Charles Darwin did, as Alvin Plantinga has pointed out). It also takes faith, and considerable devotion, to believe that reality is worth knowing, and that it’s therefore worth struggling to discover a coherent, unified theory of everything (which we certainly don’t have now). Without those dogmas, “science” only names a compendium of sometimes useful techniques and partial hypotheses which we have no reason to expect to be coherent or of any more general interest than stamp collecting. The question must then be: what sort of universe must we think this is if those dogmas are to be believable? And the answer, perhaps, is that Christian theism provides a more plausible metaphysics than currently fashionable materialism. Science and Religion, by Ruse’s account, are not at war, only because they have different fields and methods. But perhaps they are not at war because Science depends upon Religion, and rebellion will lead in the end to its disintegration.

From a recent NYT piece by Brian Leiter:

What might help philosophy [from budget cuts at universities] is the more widespread recognition that philosophy remains the only humanistic discipline that really teaches students to think critically and analytically, which is why philosophy students remain the leading performs on professional school exams like the LSAT. Even in the 21st century, smarts matter — to lawyers, to doctors, to problem-solvers in all fields, as well as to a good life. After nearly 20 years in law teaching, I can confirm that no one is smarter than the serious undergraduate philosophy major. Any school that cuts philosophy might as well put up a sign that says, ‘The smart kids should apply elsewhere.’

Andy Martin article called “The Phenomenology of Ugly” on why so many philosophers are ugly and how philosophy can save us from our ugliness.

“It is no coincidence that one of our founding philosophers, Socrates, makes a big deal out of his own ugliness. It is the comic side of the great man. Socrates is (a) a thinker who asks profound and awkward questions (b) ugly. In Renaissance neo-Platonism (take, for example, Erasmus and his account of  “foolosophers” in “The Praise of Folly”) Socrates, still spectacularly ugly, acquires an explicitly Christian logic: philosophy is there — like Sartre’s angelic curls — to save us from our ugliness (perhaps more moral than physical).”

And no, not the guy next to Sulu. I once heard Cornel West say the great voices we need to be confronting are Emerson, Chekhov, and Coltrane. (What a cool thing to say.) Read more about Chekhov here. Excerpt:

This elusiveness – a feature of both the life and the work – is a large part of what gives him his enduring fascination, as well as his striking modernity. In Chekhov literature seems to break its wand like Prospero, renouncing the magic of artifice, ceremony and idealisation, and facing us, for the first time, with a reflection of ourselves in our unadorned ordinariness as well as our unfathomable strangeness.