USUPhilosophy

You can read the long version on Leiter’s blog, but here’s the shorter one. So Synthese, a highly-respected journal of philosophy, had some guest editors put together an edition on why arguments for intelligent design (ID) are so unscientific and shoddy. Then some vocal proponents of ID complained to the overall editors, who leaned particularly on one of the contributors, Barbara Forrest, to tone down her rhetoric. Eventually, the volume was published, with the overall editors inserting a prefatory “I’m sorry this is so unprofessional” note of apology. This has made many people in the academic community angry at Synthese‘s overall editors for not having the guts to stand by what they publish.

To my mind, it is sort of of curious to see so much fuss over this. I have read Forrest’s article, and I wouldn’t say it was unfair or unprofessional, though it is a rather long and tedious argument against a small group of shoddy thinkers who would be best ignored. I don’t respect ID enough to think it merits a high-handed smackdown in a scholarly journal. But – on the other hand – the topic of evolution vs. creationism in public schools is a significant one, so I can understand a group of scholars wanting to publicly expose ID’s faults and flaws. I wonder what sort of backlash the Synthese editors were fearing? Would it have been worse than what they’re getting? I doubt it.

Interview with Grayling here. From the article:

… Grayling is almost certainly going to upset a lot of Christians, for what he has written is a secular bible. The Good Book mirrors the Bible in both form and language, and is, as its author says, “ambitious and hubristic – a distillation of the best that has been thought and said by people who’ve really experienced life, and thought about it”. Drawing on classical secular texts from east and west, Grayling has “done just what the Bible makers did with the sacred texts”, reworking them into a “great treasury of insight and consolation and inspiration and uplift and understanding in the great non-religious traditions of the world”. He has been working on his opus for several decades, and the result is an extravagantly erudite manifesto for rational thought.

Friday, November 11, 2010 � 10:00-2:00 p.m.
Oak Room, Student Center, Redwood Road Campus

We are thrilled to announce that this will be the FOURTH REGIONAL version of our Annual SLCC Student Philosophical Conference! The conference will consist of a one-hour plenary session featuring our keynote speaker Dr. Charlie Huenemann then a two-hour panel session. We are currently seeking undergraduate students to present papers at these breakout panels. These panels will be conducted and moderated by SLCC and/or visiting professors. Each student will read their paper (maximum of 15 minutes), after which a discussion/Q & A will take place.

Because we want to include as many participants as possible, we hope to have 5-7 papers presented at each panel. Additionally, the papers may be broader in scope than just Friedrich alone and need not be exclusive to our conference (enabling students to present at more than one conference). The deadlines are as follows: October 1, 2011 for Abstracts and October 31, 2011 for final papers. (Please email your completed Paper Submission Form to SLCCPhilosophyConference.)

Conference website here.

Here’s a review in the Guardian of Gary Gutting’s book Thinking the Impossible: French Philosophy Since 1960. An excerpt:

… [Y]ou don’t speak language. Language speaks you. You might think of speech or writing as ways of expressing what’s on your mind or in your heart but all you’re really doing is mouthing the cliches that linguistic structures (and strictures) permit. Marx said man was alienated from his nature. Freud said man was alienated from his desires. But for the post-structuralists, the very idea of man was itself alienating. Had Descartes really had a self, he’d have been kidding it when he said, “I think, therefore I am”. “I think, therefore I am being thought” is nearer to the deconstructionist mark. Or as Derrida more famously put it, “There is nothing outside the text”.

But was there anything inside the texts of Derrida and his fellow deconstructionists? ….

See them on the “Course Info” tab, or here.