USUPhilosophy

Note: if you were planning to be happy without being virtuous, forget about it. And, yes, for crying out loud, a computer can have a mind.

Since Apple is soon shutting down MobileMe (which is how I used to host my blog) I have moved my blog.  The old blog will be up for just a while longer before it shuts down, but I have officially moved to saintsocratessociety.com.  The new blog is still pretty rough, but over the next week I hope to get it fully up to speed.

~ Kleiner

This just in:

Aporia, Brigham Young University’s undergraduate journal of philosophy, is pleased to announce that spring 2012 issue will extent submissions until February 13, 2012. Aporia is dedicated to recognizing exemplary philosophical work at the undergraduate level. The spring 2012 issue will be published in both an online and print edition. Papers can be submitted to aporia.byu@gmail.com.

Congratulations to Greg Esplin, a graduate of USU’s philosophy program, who just yesterday successfully defended his dissertation at Purdue University!

Here is a thoughtful and insightful review by Roger Scruton of some recent books that try to connect our values, evolution, and neuroscience. An excerpt:

We are human beings, certainly. But we are also persons. Human beings form a biological kind, and it is for science to describe that kind. Probably it will do so in the way that the evolutionary psychologists propose. But persons do not form a biological kind, or any other sort of natural kind. The concept of the person is shaped in another way, not by our attempt to explain things but by our attempt to understand, to interact, to hold to account, to relate. The “why?” of personal understanding is not the “why?” of scientific inference. And it is answered by conceptualising the world under the aspect of freedom and choice. People do what they do because of events in their brains. But when the brain is normal they also act for reasons, knowing what they are doing, and making themselves answerable for it.

And at the end:

But the theory of adaptation tells us as little about the meaning of “I” as it tells us about the validity of mathematics, the nature of scientific method or the value of music. To describe human traits as adaptations is not to say how we understand them. Even if we accept the claims of evolutionary psychology, therefore, the mystery of the human condition remains. This mystery is captured in a single question: how can one and the same thing be explained as an animal, and understood as a person?