Come have a cup of tea (or other beverage of your choice), hoist a cookie, lift your pinky, and opine about matters moral and metaphysical. We’ll meet in the LPCS conference room, which can be found through the main office (Main 204), or through the door at the north end of the hall on the second floor of Main. All are welcome!
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Justin Clark on Plato
Our own Justin Clark will be presenting a lecture on Plato – Friday, 2:30 p.m., in Family Life 301. All are welcome! (Justin is practicing for a talk he will be giving at another university.) ROOM CHANGE: now in FL 307
Congrats to some USU philosophy students!
I am pleased to note that three USU philosophy students made the Intercollegiate Studies Institute Leadership Class of 2017: Millie Tullis, Jonathon Toronto, and David Bradley Zynda. To have 3 USU students in the class of 150 national student leaders is pretty impressive, especially when one sees the list of students and institutions (a great number of them are from Ivies, Stanford, U Chicago, and top flight private liberal arts colleges).
For those unfamiliar with the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI): Two years ago we founded an ISI society here at USU (the CS Lewis Society). ISI is an outfit committed to developing principled and intellectually serious leadership. Its primary focus is engaging students in the great books tradition along with providing them leadership training. It has a conservative bent, but is non-partisan. There are many notable alumni in law, politics, journalism, academia, and business, including Justices Scalia, Alito, and Gorsuch, Peter Thiel (founder of paypal), Ross Douthat (NYTimes columnist), Harvey Mansfield (well known Harvard professor), etc etc etc.
We get funding each year to support student book clubs. For those who struggle at USU to find intellectual life, this is just the ticket – fun, social, but intellectually serious conversations over very good books and free food. In addition, ISI students can apply to attend regional and national conferences, which are filled with reading, lectures, and great conversation (ISI pays for everything, from flight and hotel to food and expenses, and these are typically held at pretty tony establishments). Aside from being interesting, these conferences give students a chance to network with academic, political, and business leaders from around the country.
If you are interested in learning more about ISI, please contact Professor Kleiner at harrison.kleiner@usu.edu.
How would people really behave in the trolley problem situation?
The engaging Michael Stevens runs a psychological experiment – and the video is as instructive about the ethics of running psychological experiments as it is about human responses to moral dilemmas. An excellent documentary!
Closing the American mind, 30 years later
In anticipation of the “Snowflakes” discussion on Thursday, here is an insightful essay on the legacy of Allan Bloom’s 1987 The Closing of the American Mind. An excerpt:
For a democracy to thrive, talented youngsters had to be exposed to a philosophical education that allowed them to transcend the “bourgeois vulgarity” of their surroundings, and to devote themselves to something other than mere self-advancement. If American society could not ensure this, it risked descending into rule by elites who were no better than the uneducated mob, and for this reason perhaps far more dangerous (such was apparently his assessment of the graduates of MBA programs). As a result, Bloom believed that a “crisis of liberal education” would amount to nothing less than “the crisis of our civilization.”
USUPhilosophy 