USUPhilosophy

Hello, returning students! We hope you had a good time in the Cave this summer, and are anxious to return to the sunny contemplation of the Good. There will be a couple of Philosophy Club events right away this term, and we wanted to let you know about them and invite you to participate.

The first is our college’s “Light on the Hill” event on Monday, August 27th, beginning at 7:30 p.m. This is a fun ceremony to start the year’s journey, and Philosophy Club will have a table at the event. It would be great to have as many of us there as possible.

The second is USU’s “Day on the Quad” on Wednesday, August 29th. Again, Philosophy will have a table, and we will need to have some people to be at the table.

If you’d like to help out and be involved, please send a note to our Chief Club Guardian, Justin Solum, at justin_solum(at)yahoo.com.

I thought some of our reflective and creative essay writers might be interested in this opportunity –

Call for short writings or essays: Lessons learned from My Parents.

Did you ever experience a moment with your mother or father that changed your life, a lesson that influenced all other decisions and helped you become who you are today? At Familius we hear about these stories all the time and have launched a new, crowdsourced book project to celebrate these moments and share these lessons.

We invite you to participate by sending us an essay that shares the lesson you learned and how it has impacted you and helped you throughout your life. These lessons could be profound or simple, tragic or funny. We all have stories and our lives are improved through sharing.
Simply enter your essay in the online form below along with your information.

http://www.familius.com/1lessons-from-my-parents

Essays will be reviewed by an editorial team through October 31, 2012 and the contributors whose submissions are included in the new book Lessons From My Parents: Silent and Spoken will receive the advance eBook free and a special discount on the print edition, scheduled for release this December.
Entry length is up to you. If the lesson is short and sweet then submit it short and sweet. If it is longer send in an essay. Poetry is also acceptable. If you are a parent, you can also share how you apply the lesson today or how you use it with your own children. We look forward to reading your stories.

News from the USU Religious Studies front:

Dr. Wijitha Bandara has been hired to replace Dr. Chris Haskett.  Dr. Bandara will teach some previously scheduled courses (RELS 1010 and RELS 3020 Introduction to Hinduism).  But he will also teach a new course, Women and Buddhism (RELS 4910-005, MWF 1:00-1:50).  This course is brand new and was not listed when you registered last spring.  Check it out if you are interested.

(tip from Leiter’s blog) Here is a great big chart, from “Drunks & Lampposts,” of philosophers’ influence upon other philosophers, with an explanation of how they produced it. Neat.

Many advocates of explanation through evolution accept the possibility of group selection: that groups (societies, cultures, clans) at least partly end up the way they do because evolutionary forces operate upon them, just as those forces operate upon individuals. Steven Pinker disputes that idea here, in a thoughtful article, with a very clear account of the mechanism of evolution. Here’s his concluding summary:

The idea of Group Selection has a superficial appeal because humans are indisputably adapted to group living and because some groups are indisputably larger, longer-lived, and more influential than others. This makes it easy to conclude that properties of human groups, or properties of the human mind, have been shaped by a process that is akin to natural selection acting on genes. Despite this allure, I have argued that the concept of Group Selection has no useful role to play in psychology or social science. It refers to too many things, most of which are not alternatives to the theory of gene-level selection but loose allusions to the importance of groups in human evolution. And when the concept is made more precise, it is torn by a dilemma. If it is meant to explain the cultural traits of successful groups, it adds nothing to conventional history and makes no precise use of the actual mechanism of natural selection. But if it is meant to explain the psychology of individuals, particularly an inclination for unconditional self-sacrifice to benefit a group of nonrelatives, it is dubious both in theory (since it is hard to see how it could evolve given the built-in advantage of protecting the self and one’s kin) and in practice (since there is no evidence that humans have such a trait).

None of this prevents us from seeking to understand the evolution of social and moral intuitions, nor the dynamics of populations and networks which turn individual psychology into large-scale societal and historical phenomena. It’s just that the notion of “group selection” is far more likely to confuse than to enlighten—especially as we try to understand the ideas and institutions that human cognition has devised to make up for the shortcomings of our evolved adaptations to group living.