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Welcome back to campus! Our college, the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, has an annual welcoming ceremony in the amphitheater a little downhill of Old Main: Tuesday eve, starting around 7 p.m. It’s a fun gathering – and it involves fire – and Philosophy Club will have a table there, giving away books. Come join in the fun! (Did I mention it involves fire?)

Brad Inwood gives a digest of his book at The Montreal Review. Excerpt:

I think the enduring appeal of Aristotelian ethics is unsurprising. Once you subtract some of the culturally specific quirks of his views (Greece in the fourth century BC was not a particularly liberal environment) he gives us a highly attractive vision of good human life, one that mere humans can aspire to achieve – it allows for our foibles, but success is by no means easy. The good life it sketches has a clear link to who we are in our real natures; our ‘lower’ selves are to be guided and regulated rather than quashed, desire and pleasure are to be managed not transcended. He claims that we are essentially human, neither beasts nor gods – failure to achieve a transcendent perfection doesn’t leave us wallowing in the muck. And he recognizes the variety of human natures – we aren’t all built for the intellectual perfections that Aristotle, like most philosophers, ranks highest. If the godlike abstract thinker is somehow highest in his view there is still a robust and fully satisfying happiness open to the rest of us.

Julian Baggini reviews it here. Most books on the subject don’t engage the social dimension of science – it looks like this one is an important exception. Excerpt:

While it is central to science that its theories are based on evidence and can be tested, there is a great deal of judgment required when deciding which experiments are critical or what evidence is decisive. There is no method you can simply follow that will determine these issues for you. Breakthroughs often occur because scientists are too bloody-minded to give up on their ideas in the face of unpromising results. As Lewens writes: “Sometimes scientists, like horses, progress best when their blinkers are on.”

… Scott L. Montgomery and Daniel Chirot concur, arguing that ideas “do not merely matter; they matter immensely, as they have been the source for decisions and actions that have structured the modern world.” In “The Shape of the New: Four Big Ideas and How They Made the Modern World,” Montgomery and Chirot make the case for the importance of four ­powerful ideas, rooted in the European Enlightenment, that have created the world as we know it. “Invading armies can be resisted,” they quote Victor Hugo. “Invading ideas cannot be.”

Read the rest of Fareed Zakaria’s review here.

Eugene Thacker at 3AM Magazine:

At issue for Kant is not just the employment of reason over faith or imagination, but the instrumental use of reason – reason mastering itself, including its own limitations. This was as much the case for everyday thought as it was for philosophical thinking: “The opposite of the mind’s self-mastery… is fainthearted brooding about the ills that could befall one, and that one would not be able to withstand if they should come.”