Beck is Back!

Jacob Beck (TTU, Washington University in St. Louis)

Departmental colloquium: "Analog Magnitudes: A Case Study in Nonconceptual Cognition"

Friday, February 26, 4:00 PM - ENG/PHIL 264

See Hom Swear...

Departmental colloquium: "A Puzzle About Pejoratives"

Prof. Christopher Hom (Texas Tech University)

Friday, October 30, 4:00 PM - PHIL 264

Abstract and draft of the paper available here: http://www.webpages.ttu.edu/chom/Papers.html

"Peterpalooza": RESCHEDULED

Peter Railton (John Stephenson Perrin Professor of Philosophy, University of Michigan)

Public Lecture: "Happiness, Satisfaction, and Morality"

Friday, October 16, 4:00 PM - Engl/Phil LH01 [RESCHEDULED]

Departmental colloquium: "Rationality in Belief and Desire: A Unified Account"

Saturday, October 17, 10:00 AM - Phil 264 [RESCHEDULED]

Because of flight delays, Prof. Railton will not be able to present on Thursday night, and will instead give his public talk on Friday afternoon.

Hope you can join us!

Fall Colloquia Series

The 2009-2010 Philosophy Colloquia Series is now underway, and we have some great talks lined up this semester!

Niko Kolodny, U.C. Berkeley, Oct 1-2

Peter Railton, U. of Michigan, Oct 15-16

Christopher Hom, Texas Tech, Oct 30

Darren Hudson Hick, Texas Tech, Nov 13

David Miguel Gray, Texas Tech, Dec 4

Check the link below for times and locations:

http://www.depts.ttu.edu/philosophy/events/talksf09.php

Philosophy Grad Conference in Metaethics

The Texas Tech Philosophy Third Annual Graduate Student Conference on metaethics kicks off this Friday, April 3.  Graduate students from around the country will be presenting papers, and many of our own graduate students will be commenting.  The keynote speaker will be Geoffrey Sayre-McCord from UNC-Chapel Hill.  You can access Prof. Sayre-McCord's website here:

http://philosophy.unc.edu/smccord.htm

And the conference schedule here:

http://www.philosophy.ttu.edu/dept/GradConf2009.doc

The Stanford Encyclopedia entry on metaethics would also be something useful to look at:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/metaethics/

Hope to see you there!

Beginning Philosophy

Plato, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Reid, Armstrong... discuss away. And good luck on your first philosophy exam.

Active Learning?

If you were a student in my teaching seminar last semester, I know you are already shuddering at the post's title. Take a look at this NY Times article about active learning in intro physics classes at MIT (& other schools)--then take a look at the comments, especially the ones from MIT students who actually have to take those "TEAL" classes: they tell very different stories. Is the new style of classroom and teaching the way to go? How do we know what's the best teaching method?

http://community.nytimes.com/article/comments/2009/01/13/us/13physics.html?s=1&pg=2

Cha-ching

If you're looking into financial support for graduate school, check out the following link:

http://chronicle.com/stats/stipends/

Community College Jobs

If you are thinking about applying to community college jobs, read on:

http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2008/10/2008101401c.htm

http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2008/11/2008111701c.htm

Publishing in Graduate Journals

If you are thinking about publishing in a graduate journal, read on:

http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2008/11/a-young-philoso.html

Which philosopher will you vote for this election season?

When you need a good break, you should watch each of the following philosophy campaign ads and then rock the vote: will it be for Nietzsche, Kant, or Kierkegaard? Personally I like Kierkegaard, but I don't know if he has enough experience. I need someone reliable and tested- someone I can set my watch to.

Ad for Nietzsche:


Ad for Kierkegaard:

NEH apparently clueless about philosophy

It was in complete disbelief that I read a colleague's email this morning with the announcement of a new NEH grant called "Enduring Questions: Pilot Course Grants (http://www.neh.gov/grants/guidelines/EnduringQuestions.html). Here's the program description:

The purpose of the Enduring Questions grant program is to encourage faculty and students at the undergraduate level to grapple with the most fundamental concerns of the humanities, and to join together in deep, sustained programs of reading in order to encounter influential thinkers over the centuries and into the present day.

Enduring questions are, to an overarching degree, pre-disciplinary. They are questions to which no discipline or field or profession can lay an exclusive claim. Enduring questions can be tackled by reflective individuals regardless of their chosen vocations, areas of expertise, or personal backgrounds. They are questions that have more than one plausible or interesting answer. They have long held interest for young people, and they allow for a special, intense dialogue across generations. The Enduring Questions grant program will help promote such dialogue in today’s undergraduate environment.

What are these enduring questions? The following list is neither prescriptive nor exhaustive but serves to illustrate.

• What is the good life?
• What is justice? Mercy?
• What is freedom? Happiness?
• What is friendship?
• What is dignity?
• Is there a human nature, and, if so, what is it?
• What are the limits of scientific understanding?
• What is the relationship between humans and the natural world?
• Is there such a thing as right and wrong? Good and evil?
• What is good government?
• What are the origins of the modern world?
• What is liberal education?

The Enduring Questions grant program will support new humanities courses at the undergraduate level: their design and preparation, teaching, and assessment, as well as ancillary activities that enhance faculty-student intellectual community. Courses may be taught by faculty from any department or discipline in the humanities or by faculty outside the humanities (e.g., astronomy, biology, economics, law, mathematics, medicine, psychology), provided humanities sources are central to the course.

NEH Enduring Questions courses:

• must give evidence of “pre-disciplinary” character, encouraging reflection on human experience and avoiding extensive specialization;
• must focus on an explicitly stated question or questions, pursued in a disciplined and deliberate manner;
• must draw on significant readings from prior to the twentieth century and may draw on later works, with a preference for reading books in their entirety or near entirety;
• may draw on artworks (e.g., music, plays, sculpture);
• must reflect intellectual pluralism, anticipating more than one plausible or interesting answer to the question(s) at hand;
• must be open to all students regardless of major or concentration;
• may not be offered for graduate credit; and
• require a letter of institutional support from the president, provost, dean, program chair, or department chair, attesting to the course being new and committing to offering the course at least twice.

My question is: Has anyone at the National Endowment for Humanities ever heard of introductory philosophy courses? This is not only outrageous in the ignorance it shows about philosophy--the mother discipline of all humanities, and sciences--and about what is going on at universities around the country, it is also offensive to the discipline of philosophy. If I were on the board of the NEH, I would be utterly embarrassed.

Applying to Phd programs?

I want to start a post for those of us who will be applying to PhD programs this fall. My hope is that we can share advice and keep each other accountable for reaching our application goals. I know that I need someone to push me a little bit, and I would hope I could push someone else (in a good way). We can post links to informative websites, thoughts about writing samples/personal statements, and so on.

Philosophy of Literature Fall 2008

I wanted to create a post where those of us in Anna's Philosophy of Literature Seminar (and others) can write about class discussions and so on.

The State of the Vocation

In case you missed it, Brian Leiter has an interesting new article assessing the state of our profession here.  It seems right on to me, but I wonder whether others (including my more experienced colleagues) would agree.

Linguistic Oddities of the South

While emailing a friend today, I noticed something odd:  I take it that a honky tonk is a kind of rowdy bar found in the southern U.S. that plays to a mostly working-class clientele.  Is anyone offended by the name "honky tonk"?  Why or why not?  Isn't the word "honky" still a racial slur toward whites?  Clearly "chinky tonks" or "kikey tonks" would be offensive.  What's the difference?

Animal Rights Activists Want Chimp Declared a Person

Any thoughts?

TTU Faculty Member Commits Canadian Human Rights Violation

Canadian Human Rights Act, Section 13. (1) It is a discriminatory practice for a person or a group of persons acting in concert to communicate telephonically or to cause to be so communicated, repeatedly, in whole or in part by means of the facilities of a telecommunication undertaking within the legislative authority of Parliament, any matter that is likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt by reason of the fact that that person or those persons are identifiable on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination.  R.S., 1985, c. H-6, s. 13; 2001, c. 41, s. 88.

Notice that the Canadian government's own online posting of this statute is self-violating.

Update: Here is an interesting NYT article about the relevant case in Canada, and how the US differs from much of the western world with regard to hate speech protection. So do *we* have it wrong?

A Challenge for our resident aestheticians

Maybe it's because I drank too much coffee this morning, but I literally felt ill after reading this article (click on the link for the article itself). Apparently this art student at Yale intentionally impregnated herself multiple times, inducing miscarriage each time, and made the results of her miscarriages (including blood) into an art project. Her goal was to "spark conversation and debate on the relationship between art and the human body." The exhibit will include recorded footage of the student having her miscarriages.

The student said that she felt her project is in keeping with the true goal of art, which is to be a medium for politics and ideologies and not just a commodity. I have not particularly studied anything relevant to the intersection of ethics and art, but my questions to our aesthetics experts (and others interested in responding) would be:

1) Is the real goal of art simply to be a medium for "politics and idealogies?" My intuition would be no- this view would seem to preclude art for art's sake. While you cannot divorce art from its socio-political or historical context, it would be a stretch to say that the purpose of all art is to comment on such things.
2) I don't know a lot about the intersection between ethics and art, but I can't help but think that some boundary has been crossed. Does anybody write about the intersection of the body with art? I would intuitively put forward the principle that "it's wrong to abuse your body in order to make art," but of course "abuse" would have to be defined accordingly. At the very least, I agree with the views mentioned in the article that it trivializes the decision to have an abortion and the act itself.
3) In general, if we know that an artwork has been created on the basis of some unethical action (assuming her actions were unethical), should that bear on the way we judge the art itself? I'm not an ideal critic, so I can't seem to separate art from process in this case. What if, for instance, a woman decided to become bulimic in order to make an art project, using both the vomit and footage of her purging in the exhibit? Should we judge the relevant aesthetic features (perhaps the patterns made by the vomit) apart from how the art was made? Perhaps these scenarios are not analogous, but it at least gets me thinking.

At any rate, I would love to hear your thoughts on this question, and any other issues it brings up for you.

Brain Reading...

This wired article reports on an experiment in which researchers were able to predict the decisions of the subjects up to seven seconds in advance of the subjects' actions. The scientists and the article's author make several philosophically dodgy inferences about free will, but the result is interesting in itself....