USUPhilosophy

Conservatives sometimes rail against the liberal left dictating the curriculum at universities. But to my knowledge, no rich leftie has endowed a professorship with the stipulations that they get a say in who gets hired in it and they get to require that a particular book be taught in the curriculum. (Anticipated neo-conservative response: see how bad things have become? We must take drastic measures!) Fill in the blanks with “Koch brothers” and “Atlas Shrugged” and you have the situation at Florida State. Michael Ruse muses here. Ruse: “What I find more troublesome is that the dean of the College of Social Science and the chair of the Department of Economics seem bewildered that there should have been any controversy.” The Onion should take note: FSU is outdoing them.

CORRECTION: I was wrong; the Koch Bros. haven’t insisted on Atlas Shrugged. That’s another course at FSU, sponsored by a bank.

We’ve raised this question before, but recently a new batch of students were (was? Was the batch asking, or were the students?) asking Kleiner and me about what books should be read by students just starting to study philosophy. What recommendations do you have?

William Lane Craig (“Yes”) and Shelly Kagan (“No”) debated the question. There is a link to their debate and a good, on-going discussion of it over on Prosblogion. The blog’s discussion is really quite impressive; my experience is that very often, after the first eight posts or so, comments on blogs usually lose track of the topic or become childishly snippy. (Not on any of my blogs, of course!) But this one maintains a decent level of focus and civility.

A belated congratulations to Philosophy majors and minors who graduated this term! Be well, best wishes to you, and please check in from time to time and let us know what you are doing.

No doubt following our edition of The Philosophers’ Carnival, The New Yorker recently published an article on David Eagleman, a neuroscientist pursuing many mysteries, including the ways our brains/minds process time. It’s an interesting read.

Time is a dimension like any other, fixed and defined down to its tiniest increments: millennia to microseconds, aeons to quartz oscillations. Yet the data rarely matches our reality. The rapid eye movements in the mirror, known as saccades, aren’t the only things that get edited out. The jittery camera shake of everyday vision is similarly smoothed over, and our memories are often radically revised. What else are we missing? When Eagleman was a boy, his favorite joke had a turtle walking into a sheriff’s office. “I’ve just been attacked by three snails!” he shouts. “Tell me what happened,” the sheriff replies. The turtle shakes his head: “I don’t know, it all happened so fast.”