USUPhilosophy

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.

Thomas Nagel’s latest book, Mind & Cosmos, is getting a fair bit of attention, probably because Nagel is “out of step” with the dominant trend in Anglo-American philosophy toward naturalism. Many of our readers may know Nagel as the “bat guy”, or the guy who argued that even if you could know all of the neurological facts about a bat, you still would be no closer to know what it is like to be a bat (hence, physicalism is false). In this book, he’s arguing that materialism and Darwinism just cannot answer all of the questions we find interesting. Brian Leiter and Michael Weisberg criticize Nagel’s book here.

Time for a poll. What do you believe? Or: what options am I missing?