“Flock of dodos” screening

From Religious Studies Club:

The USU School of Teacher Education and Leadership will be hosting a movie entitled “Flock of Dodos: The Evolution-Intelligent Design Circus” tomorrow (Friday October 10th) at 6:30 in the Emma Eccles Jones Education Building Auditorium (Education 131).

This video documentary highlights the debate between proponents of the concept of intelligent design and the scientific consensus that supports evolution. The documentary was first screened publicly on February 2, 2006 in Kansas, where much of the public controversy on intelligent design began. It examines the disagreements that proponents of intelligent design have with the scientific consensus position of evolution.

From what I’ve seen, the film has been praised as being very even-handed.

Great Books Club

A student has suggested the formation of an informal ‘Great Books Club’.  The idea is that the club would meet once a week (time and place to be determined, though Thursday at 6:30pm was suggested).
 
What the group would read would be negotiable, but at the top of Dan’s list (the student who suggested such a thing) were Dante- The Divine Comedy, Shakespeare- King Lear and Hamlet, and Cervantes- Don Quixote.
I think this is a great idea.  As Plato says, lovers of learning should love the whole of learning, so  we philosophers (lovers of wisdom) should want to read everything we can.  And there is some reason to hope that there is interest in such things.  Two examples that help save me from absolute despair over the place of reading in our culture:
a) Just this morning I was reading in the ~Quad Side Cafe, and the student sitting next to me was reading Russell’s ‘Why I am not a Christian’.  I am not sure if that is a ‘great book’, but still impressive.  I asked him if it was for a course, and he replied, ‘no, I am just interesting in things like this.’
b) When I was a graduate student in Indiana, I went to get my oil changed at a Jiffy Lube.  The mechanic and I got to talking and when I told him I was studying philosophy, his grease-smeared face peered up and he said, ‘Oh, have you read Heidegger’s Being and Time?’  Apparently he was on his third reading of it, though he only had graduated from high school.  When pressed for why he reads such things, he said, ‘I guess I’m just interested in hermeneutic phenomenology’.
So there is hope!  
Students should post here with suggestions about date and time, and I will let Dan organize it from there.
 

The Gettier problem

I’ve started preparing to teach PHIL 4300 (Epistemology) in the spring, and while doing so I’ve been kicking around the Gettier problem in my mind. What? Haven’t heard of it? Allow me to explain.

A standard account of knowledge in philosophy (since Plato) is this. I know something (call it “x”) when (1) x is in fact true, (2) I believe x, and (3) I have some good reasons for believing x. This seems to fit a great many cases of knowledge. It’s hard to come up with counterexamples. But then along came Edmund Gettier in the 1960s who provided cases like this one:

Suppose that Smith and Jones have applied for a certain job. And suppose that Smith has strong evidence for the following conjunctive proposition:

    1. Jones is the man who will get the job, and Jones has ten coins in his pocket.

Smith’s evidence for (1) might be that the president of the company assured him that Jones would in the end be selected, and that he, Smith, had counted the coins in Jones’s pocket ten minutes ago. Proposition (1) entails:

    2. The man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket.

Let us suppose that Smith sees the entailment from (1) to (2), and accepts (2) on the grounds of (1), for which he has strong evidence. In this case, Smith is clearly justified in believing that (2) is true.
But imagine, further, that unknown to Smith, he himself, not Jones, will get the job. And, also, unknown to Smith, he himself has ten coins in his pocket. Proposition (2) is then true, though proposition (1), from which Smith inferred (2), is false.

OK, sort of lame. But it is a counterexample.

My own temptation is to say that Smith was not justified in believing Jones was going to get the job, and so wasn’t justified in believing that the person who would get the job has ten coins in his pocket. Yes, he had some evidence for thinking Jones would get the job, and so maybe he was justified in believing that his belief was justified, but in fact it wasn’t justified. Does that make sense?

Philosophy reddit

There is an interesting website called “reddit.com”, which hosts discussions on a wide variety of topics. People post a link to some interesting webpage, and readers then make comments about it and one another’s comments. You can add or subtract “points” from postings and comments, depending on how good you think they are. They have a philosophy sub-unit, which you can see here.It is definitely worth checking out from time to time.

I hasten to advise you, though, to visit several times just as a lurker, to get a feel for the general atmosphere and the way things are done, before actively contributing. Many of the regular users are really quite sharp, and they do not suffer fools gladly! (And there are sometimes some irksome trolls wandering about.)

Catholic Social Ethics

Perhaps I am treating the philosophy blog too loosely in this post, but I don’t think so.  If Strauss is right, philosophy is by nature political (it concerns the discernment of the good, and the vexed relationship between high-minded principle and dirty human affairs).  Besides, this post is not religious per se (since the Catholic Church teaches that her moral principles are knowable by natural reason).

Here is an article from the NY Times today on the role of Catholic voters in the coming election.  

You can link here for a 2007 statement from the US Conference of Bishops on voting, though this provides a more manageable summary (it does lack the nuance of the original though).  For students in my Social Ethics class and for others, it is a nice outline of moral principles Catholics see as binding and a look at how these principles relate to various political and social issues. Even if you are not Catholic or if you reject the moral principles that are outlined, it still provides a nice model of what thoughtful and principled application of moral principles looks like (and that is far too rare).

The ‘guide’ does not attempt to tell Catholics exactly how to vote, and it is not a partisan document (one will find that Catholics do not fit neatly on one side of the conservative/liberal divide). Political decisions are prudential judgments, and each person must make prudential judgments for themselves. (A prudential judgment is a judgment where a general principle is applied to a particular situation).