USUPhilosophy

I know what everyone wants now is more to read! So I’m leaving a box of issues of Dialogue outside my office door (Main 208). Feel free to take one. Dialogue is a journal of undergraduate philosophy published by Phi Sigma Tau, the national honor society of philosophy. You may find it interesting to see what your peers are up to at other institutions!

Interesting essay here by a scientist about neuromania, or the endeavor to explain everything through brain stuff. Sample excerpt:

Comparing the humanities and the sciences is a bit like comparing apples and oranges. It isn’t clear that the goals are the same. Scientists may employ a variety of different intellectual and material techniques, but they all seem geared towards gaining power over nature: both physical control and explanatory power. Science is about what is the case, not what ought to be the case. Science describes, but does not prescribe. The humanities do involve explanation, but I think they are more closely wrapped up with theoughts. The humanities are never far from the question of how the individual and the society ought to behave. The humanities explore values, whereas many scientists and philosophers agree that choosing what we should value is outside the strict purview of science. Science can describe how the brain and body encode and make manifest our personal value systems, and how values spread through societies, but it is not equipped with tools for deciding what to value in the first place.

The Southern Utah University Philosophy Program is pleased to announce our 2015 Undergraduate
Philosophy Conference! The conference will be held on Saturday, February 7th.
Dr. Kari Theurer (Trinity College) will provide the keynote address (title TBA).
We invite high quality papers from undergraduate students in all areas of analytic philosophy (broadly
construed).
Papers should be between 2000-3000 words, should include an abstract of about 200 words, and should
be prepared for blind review (please include full contact and affiliation information in your submission
email only).
Please submit your papers as a word or .pdf file to
Suuphilosophy@gmail.com by December 20th 2014

2015 SUU CFP

An excellent essay here by Davia Sills about the cultural space zombies occupy for us. Excerpt:

At the heart of the zombie metaphor lies our need to understand our own personhood: can we extract good from all that darkness? Can we come back from the depths of despair and retake the world of light? We still have our share of monsters, like the skulking, mindless killers on the long-running US TV series, The Walking Dead. But more and more, viewers want to see zombies such as R from Warm Bodies and Camille from Les revenants who are just as confused, angry and unsure about their place in the world as we are. The humanised zombie is an antidote to the ever-present threat of terrorists, school shooters, exotic pathogens and predators of all sorts because it offers the potential for us to understand those who are different from us. Sure, zombies with personalities crave human flesh, but the most evolved of them struggle to control themselves, either in memoriam of the person they were or for the sake of the human beings they now love.

Read the whole article.

Interesting essay here in Aeon about personal identity, the soul, and moral character. An excerpt:

Recent studies by the philosopher Shaun Nichols at the University of Arizona and myself support the view that the identity-conferring part of a person is his moral capacities. One of our experiments pays homage to Locke’s thought experiment by asking subjects which of a slew of traits a person would most likely take with him if his soul moved to a new body. Moral traits were considered more likely to survive a body swap than any other type of trait, mental or physical. Interestingly, certain types of memories – those involving people – were deemed fairly likely to survive the trip. But generic episodic memories, such as one’s commute to work, were not. People are not so much concerned with memory as with memory’s ability to connect us to others and our capacity for social action.