USUPhilosophy

Dan Wack, a philosopher from Knox College in Illinois, will present a lecture this Thursday (11/8) at 4:30 in Main 304. All are welcome! I will include here an abstract of his lecture:

In section XI of Part II of his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein distinguishes between two uses of the verb ‘to see’. On the one hand, there is a use of ‘to see’ in which one succeeds in seeing in the relevant sense if one is able to describe or reproduce the object seen. On the other, there is a use of ‘to see’ in which one succeeds if one recognizes a resemblance between two objects. In clarifying the relation between these two uses of ‘to see’, I articulate a Wittgensteinian account of perception in which one’s perception is organized and oriented by the demands of what one is going to do. In so doing, I locate Wittgenstein’s account of perceptual knowledge in a longer philosophical tradition of critical physiognomy, in which an person’s movements are seen as revelatory of her intentions, feelings, moods, and character, and show how clarifying relations between perception and understanding in acts of physiognomic judgment helps us resist characteristic philosophical confusion.

Students in Philosophy of Mind should see this as continuous with Dennett’s attempt to understand what seem like “private” mental states as inextricably bound up with public expressions of those states.

Richard Kraut was a teacher of mine in grad school. He’s a very thoughtful, generous philosopher with views well worth hearing. There is an interview with him at 3:AM here, and it covers his views of ancient philosophy and the relevance of history generally to contemporary philosophy, as well as his views of contemporary moral theory. An excerpt:

[T]he conception of well-being that I favour is not a philosophical invention alien to common ways of thought – something that a philosopher dreamt up out of the blue. It is part of our conceptual framework that infants and children are beings that need to grow, and that this process is good for them. There are wonderful things that we experience in childhood, but Peter Pan to the contrary, refusing to grow up is not healthy.

Other theories of well-being simply overlook this aspect of our common normative framework. Rawls, for example, as I’ve noted, focuses on rational planning: what is good for us is to achieve the plan that we would adopt with full deliberative rationality. But infants and small children are not yet able to engage in the sophisticated intellectual activity we call planning. They can’t look for reasons to pursue this end rather than that. Yet it is undeniable that much that they do is good for them, much that they do is bad for them, and much that willy-nilly happens to them is good or bad for them. It can’t be the case that we have two different concepts of what is good for a human being – one of which is applicable to infants and small children, and the other of whic is applicable to later stages of life.

Of course, the things that are good for small children are different from the things that are good for adults. But there is only one relation here: the relation of being good for someone. I think that one point in favor of the developmental conception of well-being that I derive from Aristotle is that it recognises this unity.

USU is hosting an Ethics Bowl on Saturday, Nov 10.  The event will last much of the day.  We are in need of at least 4 moderators.  Students can fill that role so I am looking for some student volunteers.  It should be fun – you’ll get to hear some interesting moral dilemmas and various arguments on all sides.  No special training or expertise required to serve as a moderator.  You just need to be able to watch a clock to keep teams within their time limits.  You’ll get a free lunch to boot!

Let me know if you are interested by emailing me: harrison.kleiner@usu.edu

An embarrassment of riches next week.  Hemming lectures on Tuesday, and then another philosophy lecture on Thursday:

John Crosby of Franciscan University of Steubenville will be presenting a talk titled “The Phenomenology of Love”.  It should be an excellent talk, of particular interest to those interested in 20th century continental thought.  I expect his paper to draw from the work of Karol Wojtyla (John Paul II) and the great – and widely under-appreciated – Catholic philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand.

Dr. Crosby’s lecture will be in Main 304 on Thursday Nov 1 at 4:00pm.

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.