USUPhilosophy

Interesting review here of Daniel C. Russell, Happiness for Humans. An interesting passage:

Suppose that songbirds as they are presently constituted are not receptive to the beauty of their chirping, but that genetic manipulation could give them an enriched awareness of the musical features of their songs, with the result that they get much more enjoyment from their singing. Assuming that this had no ill side effects, their lives would be better — it would be better for a songbird to be a songbird than it was before. This thought experiment suggests that the appreciation of beauty would be a good thing for any creature who can be made receptive to it. So, it is not someone’s membership in the human family that makes it the case that it is good for him to appreciate beauty and bad for him to lack this receptivity. Rather, the appreciation of beauty is a good thing — good, that is, for the creature, of whatever species, who has it.

I wonder: what if, through genetic manipulation, I could be enhanced so as to view with aesthetic pleasure something truly and intrinsically ugly – that is, to incorrectly view it as beautiful. Would that be a good thing?

The Religious Studies program runs an online, student-run journal called the “Intermountain West Journal of Religious Studies”.  To keep things running, they need a few students each year to volunteer to help.  It is a nice opportunity to get involved in editing and research.  Here is the official plea for student help:

Most, if not all, professional philosophers have to deal with rejection letters from journal editors.  What might those editors have said when rejecting some of the great works of philosophy?  This clever blog imagines those letters:

https://philosophersrejected.wordpress.com

For your amusement, below. And don’t forget Light on the Hill, tonight at 7:30 at the amphitheater on Old Main Hill.

Some of you understand and like Levinas, and there’s a recent book on his view of time, reviewed here. Representative quote:

If the instant is often understood as a liberating hiatus from the flux of time, only achievable internally by the self-present subject, then Levinas is original in claiming that the instant is more akin to captivity and powerlessness (50). The instant is a timeless present, without motion and without hope for the future; this point is disclosed readily in the experience of insomnia. For Levinas, this entails a distinct privation of time, a riveting to immanence. It is the very lack of transcendence (61). Given this reading of the instant, Severson shows, through a compelling interpretation of the unusual ideas that fill Existence and Existents, how Levinas positions himself to argue later for an “eschatological redemption of the instant” (61), which casts time as “a gift from the other” (63). Only the other, Levinas will argue, can deliver the insomniac from the terror of the night and set time in motion again. Hope, at this point, becomes the foundation of Levinas’s philosophy of time.

Enjoy!