USUPhilosophy

Errol Morris is a great filmmaker of documentaries. His “Thin Blue Line” and “Mr. Death” are absolutely riveting. I didn’t know until now that he had spent some time studying the history of science at Princeton and philosophy at Berkeley. He has a couple of very interesting recent articles about his experiences in the NYT: one about the time that Thomas Kuhn threw an ashtray at his head, and a second about Kuhn and Kripke and their very different accounts of how names and theories hook up with the world (or fail to).

Utah Valley University hosts a splendid undergraduate philosophy conference each spring. I just received a call for papers today, and the deadline for abstracts is THIS FRIDAY, so get going NOW! (The organizer tells me she can be a bit flexible about the deadline, so do not refrain from submitting only because you might end up a couple of days late.)

UVU UNDERGRADUATE
PHILOSOPHY CONFERENCE
Submission Guidelines & Prizes
Sessions: Friday March 25, 2011 from 10:00 to 5:15.
Timpanogos Room (4th Floor of UVU Library)
Word limit: 2500-3500 words
Email papers to: DONAHOER@uvu.edu and weigelch@gmail.com
Subject: “undergraduate conference entry”
The paper should contain no identifying information about the author, and should be in .doc, .docx, or .pdf format.
Awards:
$100 first place
$60 second place
$40 third place
$20 each for 5-10 honorable mentions
All accepted papers will be published
in conference proceedings.
Student Paper Submission Deadline: Friday March 11 at noon.

USU S.H.A.F.T. has a blogpost describing Sherlock’s recent lecture, and also features a recording of the lecture (thanks to Will Holloway).

Here is a review of a recent book describing a 1929 philosophy conference where Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger had a famous exchange, and both Levinas and Carnap were in the audience. The confrontation was fascinating; according to the review —

Gordon begins his book with a broad characterization of Cassirer’s and Heidegger’s philosophical positions. At the core of their debate at Davos (and, it turns out, at the core of their entire philosophical thought) lay, as Gordon puts it, “a fundamental contest between two normative images of humanity,” (p. 6) a contest “between thrownness and spontaneity” (p. 7). Where neo-Kantian Cassirer saw human beings as gifted with a capacity for “spontaneous self-expression” and thus endowed with “a complete freedom” to create worlds of meaning, Heidegger envisaged them to be determined by their “finitude” and thus as living in the midst of conditions they have not created and cannot hope to control.

Here is a book review of James Gleick’s recent book The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood by the great scientist Freeman Dyson. The book sounds like an interesting history of our grappling with both information and meaning. Dyson’s review is well worth reading. Here’s how it ends:

Gleick’s book has an epilogue entitled “The Return of Meaning,” expressing the concerns of people who feel alienated from the prevailing scientific culture. The enormous success of information theory came from Shannon’s decision to separate information from meaning. His central dogma, “Meaning is irrelevant,” declared that information could be handled with greater freedom if it was treated as a mathematical abstraction independent of meaning. The consequence of this freedom is the flood of information in which we are drowning. The immense size of modern databases gives us a feeling of meaninglessness. Information in such quantities reminds us of Borges’s library extending infinitely in all directions. It is our task as humans to bring meaning back into this wasteland. As finite creatures who think and feel, we can create islands of meaning in the sea of information. Gleick ends his book with Borges’s image of the human condition:

We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and of the future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information.