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Philosophy News
News, Events, and Commentary on Philosophy from Around the World08.10.09
Iraq: Political Philosophy in Relief
Richard Pimentel, in his latest article for WHiP, considers whether Iraq could ever be truly free and secure. While much progress has been made in recent days, the future of Iraq is set of open questions. In “A Free and Secure Iraq?” Richard considers some of these questions and their philsophical implications.
Iraq has reached a crossroads, one which will determine the success of the US invasion and occupation and the growth of Iraq after complete withdrawal of foreign forces. The crucial questions are whether Iraq can achieve freedom and security and make them hallmarks of their country. Or will Iraq struggle to flourish if both concepts are not fully functional in their country?Read the full article here: http://news.philosophynews.com/free-and-secure-iraq/
05.28.09
Seven Pounds and Five Questions
In his latest article for WHiP, Richard Pimentel reviews the movie Seven Pounds from the perspective of modern ethics. This thoughful movie raises a number of interesting ethical questions relying on intuition to answer some and leaving others unanswered entirely. Rick seeks to call out these questions and leaves you, the reader, to take up the ethics books and find answers.
Despite the movie’s aesthetic qualities, numerous ethical issues kept running through my mind as I watched. Seven Pounds is a great example of how the theoretical discipline of ethics leads to practical implications. As a way of getting to the ethical subtext of Seven Pounds, I will pose five questions that deserve answers. The purpose is not to wholly provide the answers to the questions but rather to provoke thought about significant ethical issues that affect everyday living.Article: http://news.philosophynews.com/whip/the-ethics-of-seven-pounds-this-article-contains-spoilers/
05.02.09
Annoucement: Editorial Postion Open
EDITOR
JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY
Applications and nominations are invited for the position of Editor of the Journal of the History of Philosophy. The Editor will serve a five-year renewable term beginning July 1, 2010. The Journal, an international quarterly, publishes articles, notes, discussions, and reviews devoted to the history of Western philosophy, broadly conceived. The Editor must be a leading scholar in an area of the history of Western philosophy. It is also expected that the Editor’s home institution will provide operating support that supplements that from the publisher, Johns Hopkins University Press, and the Board of Directors. The Editor is responsible to the Board of Directors for the editorial process of the Journal, which includes supervision of the refereeing process for submitted manuscripts, issue composition, and relations with the publisher.Initial expressions of interest should be made by September 30, 2009. Complete applications, including a copy of the applicant’s C.V., must be received by December 31, 2009, to be considered. Send all correspondence preferably by e-mail to:
martinich@mail.utexas.edu
or by post to
Prof. Al Martinich, Search Committee Chair
Department of Philosophy
1 University Station
University of Texas at Austin
Austin, TX 78712
USA
The Journal of the History of Philosophy is committed to equal opportunity and affirmative action in all appointment decisions.
The View from London and Chicago: The Effect of Perception on Economics
In his latest article for WHiP, Richard Pimentel considers the impact of two major economic schools of thought on the public’s acceptance of President Obama’s 2009 economic stimulus package. The “rightness” or “wrongness” of a particular economic theory may have less to do with the actual merits or demerits of a given system and more to do with how the public percieves the outcomes of that system.
Perception must be taken into account when discussing the ARRA package and the economy in general. For this reason, the current administration in the White House has carefully and intentionally presented the state of the economy in a way that will affect the perception of the people. This is not an accusation that the administration misrepresents the state of affairs. Rather it is an argument that this administration, just like every other administration, realizes that perception is important in shaping the economy.See the full article here.
03.16.09
The Ethics of Obama’s New Embryo Policy
The president rejected the "false choice between sound science and moral values" that supposedly characterized the Bush policy. He declared that his administration would "make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology." Promoting science, Obama said, means "letting scientists . . . do their jobs, free from manipulation or coercion" and "listening to what they tell us, even when it’s inconvenient."http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2009/03/15/embryos_and_ethics/?p1=Well_MostPop_Emailed6
But science is not an unqualified good, and scientific ends do not justify any and all means. It is not "manipulation" or "coercion" or "ideology" to insist that scientific research – especially when funded by taxpayers – be restrained by moral and ethical guardrails.
French Physicist Wins Templeton Prize
French physicist and philosopher Bernard d’Espagnat has won the 2009 Templeton Prize, billed as the world’s largest annual award to an individual, for his work affirming the spiritual dimension of life.http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUSTRE52F2GC20090316
The Templeton Foundation announced the $1.42 million prize at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Paris on Monday.
03.10.09
Big Bucks for Digitizing Philosophy
The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded $400,000 over two years to the Indiana Philosophy Ontology project — InPhO for short — which is creating interactive, digital tools to help students and scholars explore the discipline of philosophy.http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/10158.html
03.05.09
New Book on Evolution Claims to Be “Definitive”
Evolution: The First Four Billion Years
edited by philosopher and biologist Michael Ruse and Joseph Travis contains almost “everything you’d want to know about evolution.” (Travis). The book draws from a variety of disciplines including philosophy to “provide a single source where we could make a definitive statement about all that we currently know about evolution, as well as what we don’t know.” The book is being billed as both a history and a page turner. “Keep it by your couch or bedside table and dip into it whenever you have a few minutes. The ideas are compelling and the personalities intriguing.” (Ruse)
edited by philosopher and biologist Michael Ruse and Joseph Travis contains almost “everything you’d want to know about evolution.” (Travis). The book draws from a variety of disciplines including philosophy to “provide a single source where we could make a definitive statement about all that we currently know about evolution, as well as what we don’t know.” The book is being billed as both a history and a page turner. “Keep it by your couch or bedside table and dip into it whenever you have a few minutes. The ideas are compelling and the personalities intriguing.” (Ruse)Working together over more than six years, Travis and Ruse enlisted some of the world’s top scholars from a variety of fields — genetics, paleontology, epidemiology, theology and philosophy, to name a few — to write a series of “big picture” essays describing their particular areas of expertise as they relate to evolution. What emerges is a multifaceted picture of what is perhaps the most discussed and debated scientific concept of the past 150 years.http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/549788/
Evolution Needs Atheism to Survive
Daniel Dennett appears to be making the rounds. He spoke at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in early March 2009. The title in the school newspaper states that the lecture was about Dennett promoting evolution. But clearly the author, Marie Puissant, has Dennett’s other agenda in mind. After three short paragraphs, Puissant mentions Dennett’s atheism and his BRIGHTs movement and later quotes a student who was disappointed with the lecture because “he [Dennett] didn’t demonstrate how evolution knocked intelligent design out of the ranks.” Apparently, evolution per se just isn’t all that interesting. Religions like Darwinism thrive on controversy and Dennett’s boring philosophy lectures have to be spiced up in the school newspaper by invoking the popular whipping boy of theism. It’s one religion verses another.
“We don’t know if it was created,” Dennett said. “Maybe it’s eternal. There doesn’t have to be a beginning of the whole universe. We know the beginning of the universe we can see was from the Big Bang Theory.”http://badgerherald.com/news/2009/03/03/philosopher_promotes.php
02.18.09
Nothing New in Naturalism
Blogger “muddle” for The Citizen Online writes a lengthy and very intelligent review of a relatively new book by well-known dualists Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro. The book is called, simply enough, Naturalism
, and muddle goes through the volume chapter by chapter summarizing each. The review does a nice job capturing the essential arguments of the book and gives such a healthy overview of the volume that one could provide a précis of its core arguments without having read the actual work.
In reading the review and the book, it struck me that there has not been much progress in ascending many of the difficulties facing naturalism. It seems to me that naturalists need something of a Copernican Revolution in metaphysics in order to change the playing field enough to provide a foundation for the answers the movement requires.
Naturalism seems to face some insurmountable problems like the identity problem. If the properties of a first-person experience are metaphysically distinct from the properties of the physical material in which the experience seems to take place, how can they be identical? Do you think naturalism can overcome such challenges? Discuss this question in Philosophy News forums.
, and muddle goes through the volume chapter by chapter summarizing each. The review does a nice job capturing the essential arguments of the book and gives such a healthy overview of the volume that one could provide a précis of its core arguments without having read the actual work. In reading the review and the book, it struck me that there has not been much progress in ascending many of the difficulties facing naturalism. It seems to me that naturalists need something of a Copernican Revolution in metaphysics in order to change the playing field enough to provide a foundation for the answers the movement requires.
Of course, if we already know that mental properties just are constituted by physical properties and thus supervenient in this way, then we must agree. But this is precisely the point in dispute, and apart from such a stipulation such worlds appear to be conceivable. (Similarly, if Hitler is depraved, and his depravity is constituted by some combination of his natural properties, then there is no possible world in which someone is naturally indiscernible from Hitler but is not depraved. But this observation alone will hardly satisfy the moral skeptic who wonders why we should think that moral properties like depravity exist in the first place.)http://www.thecitizen.com/~citizen0/node/35017
Naturalism seems to face some insurmountable problems like the identity problem. If the properties of a first-person experience are metaphysically distinct from the properties of the physical material in which the experience seems to take place, how can they be identical? Do you think naturalism can overcome such challenges? Discuss this question in Philosophy News forums.
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