USUPhilosophy

Laurence Paul Hemming will be returning to USU next week.  He has lectured here before and has been very well received.  He is very capable on a wide range of subjects (his last talk was on Zeno’s paradox), but is probably best known for his work on Heidegger (his book Heidegger’s Atheism was well received) as well as work on Nietzsche.

He will be here next Tuesday (Oct 30) at 3:30 pm in Animal Science 314.  The title of his talk will be ‘Rationalising the Animal in Humanity: Philosophy and the Birth of Thinking’.

Everyone is also welcome to his public lecture at the St Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church at 7pm Tuesday.  Hemming has published an excellent book on the liturgy, and his lecture that evening is titled ’Why worship is the source and summit of our lives as Catholics?’.

Church address: 725 South 250 East in Hyde Park.  Drive north from campus on 800 East for  few miles.  A little past 2900 North, you enter into Hyde Park (and the street number changes to 250E).  You will see the church on the left a few blocks later.

The University of Utah is hosting this year’s Intermountain Philosophy Conference this Friday. Here is the website with the schedule and other details. If you are interested and want a ride, or can offer one, post a comment saying as much, and we’ll see what order spontaneously develops through the flow of information!

He sighed, finally understanding why some artists stopped painting, why explorers stopped exploring and why Guns N’ Roses should’ve only released one album. He knew he existed, not just because he’d spent years of his life proving it, but because if he didn’t, he wouldn’t feel the crushing weight of everyone’s expectations pressing down on his slender shoulders.

He twirled the end of his goatee, staring blankly at the wall, until his thoughts were interrupted by a text message. It was a picture of Galileo, holding up the “Father of Modern Science” mug Descartes had sent. “Thanks bro. — GG,” he’d typed.

Read the rest here.

(Thanks to M. Fuelling)

Here is an interesting article by Massimo Pigliucci on several questions relating to the unification of knowledge. I find it sensible, though it’s written from a naturalistic perspective, so of course I would. The conclusion:

This isn’t a suggestion to give up, much less a mystical injunction to go ‘beyond science’. There is nothing beyond science. But there is important stuff before it: there are human emotions, expressed by literature, music and the visual arts; there is culture; there is history. The best understanding of the whole shebang that humanity can hope for will involve a continuous dialogue between all our various disciplines. This is a more humble take on human knowledge than the quest for consilience, but it is one that, ironically, is more in synch with what the natural sciences tell us about being human.