SAP Annual Lecture: Death in Our Life
Posted by Lisa Evans in Event, Journal Club, Podcast, Uncategorized on May 16, 2012
The 2012 lecture will be given by Professor Joseph Raz on the topic of Death in Our Life.
Tuesday 22nd May 2012
5pm – 6.30pm, Corpus Christi College, Oxford, UK
All are welcome to attend the lecture, which will be followed by a drinks reception for Society for Applied Philosophy members. Find out more here.
Previous Lectures
2011: The Global Reach of Human Rights, Professor Amartya Sen
2010: Militant Modern Atheism, Professor Philip Kitcher
2009: Measuring Development, Poverty and Gender Equity, Professor Thomas Pogge
2008: Naturalism, Normativity, and Applied Ethics, Baroness Onora O’Neill
dialectica Essay Prize – Cognitive Penetration
Posted by Lisa Evans in Journal Club, Research, Teaching & Learning on May 3, 2012
The dialectica 2012 essay prize topic has been announced! Submit your article on the topic of Cognitive Penetration before November 1st for your chance to win £1,500!
Cognitive penetration refers to the influence of beliefs, expectations, moods, desires or background theories on the content of perceptual processes or conscious experiences. This phenomenon has been in the forefront of the philosophy of science, the philosophy of perception, and the foundations of cognitive science. Philosophers of science have warned that cognitive penetration might threaten the epistemic role of perception as an objective source of knowledge and have used it to explain radical paradigm shifts. Philosophers of perception have tried to characterize the various ways in which perceptual processes or conscious experiences can be altered by other mental states or activities. Cognitive scientists have exploited this phenomenon as a starting point to motivate claims on the architecture of the human mind, including modularity and plasticity.
We invite submissions on any aspect of this phenomenon. Possible questions include: How is the influence of various mental states on perceptual processes or experiences to be characterized in psychological terms? Are there principled differences between the cognitive penetration of conscious experiences and that of subpersonal perceptual processes? What is the impact (if any) of cognitive penetration on the individuation of mental states? What kinds of cognitive penetration are there? Does cognitive penetration lend support to relativism? How does cognitive penetration relate to the confirmation of scientific theories by experience? Does cognitive penetration undermine (or support) some models of perceptual justification? Does the use of instruments to observe phenomena presuppose any form of cognitive penetration? What sorts of evidence can support or disconfirm claims about cognitive penetration? Could it shed new light on Kuhnian incommensurability?
Please send your submissions in pdf format to Philipp Keller, philipp.keller@unige.ch, by the 1st of November 2012. The author of the winning entry will receive £1500. All papers submitted will be considered submissions to the journal and should not be published or under review elsewhere.
Virtual Issue on Genetics
Posted by Liam Cooper (Managing Editor) in Research, Teaching & Learning on April 23, 2012
This special online issue of the Hastings Center Report brings together disparate discussions of the ethical issues posed by genetic science. In early issues of the Report, in the 1970s, discussions of genetics often sought partly just imply to identify and organize the issues- and to argue, in effect, that this was a topic that bioethics should address. Since then, the discussion has turned to more narrowly drawn issues. In this issue, for example, a set of six essays addresses the prospect that genetic information will lead to an era of “personalized medicine, ” with implications not only for medical treatment but also for cost of care, biobanking, privacy, and access to information, among other things. In the lead article, legal scholar Mark Rothstein considers whether health policy should address genetic information separately from other kinds of medical information, and in an editorial on Rothstein founded in the column titled Another Voice, British philosopher Neil Manson explains why treating genetic information separately seems so attractive. A special supplement to this issue, by Hastings scholar Erik Parens, explores the ramifications of behavioral genetics, and other items branch off in still other directions, including (genuinely going afield here) into the prospect that genetic and other sciences might allow human beings to transcend the human condition. The items selected for this issue emphasize more recent scholarship and commentary, but were otherwise chosen precisely to capture as much as possible of the range of material that has appeared in the Report on this topic.
Click here to read the virtual issue.
Perceptual experience: both relational and contentful
Posted by Lisa Evans in Viewpoint on March 27, 2012
We are pleased to invite you to the 2012 Mark Sacks lecture:
Perceptual experience: both relational and contentful
John McDowell
It seems right to say that perceptual experience puts experiencing subjects in (direct or immediate) relation with items in their environments. It is increasingly widely held that there is an inconsistency between that claim and the idea that perceptual experience has content. John McDowell will argue that there is no such inconsistency.
The paper from this lecture will be published in an upcoming issue of the European Journal of Philosophy and the lecture will be recorded and made available as a free podcast.
Date and time: 5.30pm, Friday 15th June 2012
Venue: Humanities Research Institute, University of Sheffield, 34 Gell Street, S3 7QY, UK
All are welcome to attend the lecture which will be followed by a drinks reception hosted by Wiley-Blackwell.
The texts of previous lectures in this series (formerly known as the EJP Annual Lectures) have been published as follows:
2011: Identity, Individuation and Substance, David Wiggins
2010: Why Are You Betraying Your Class?, Avishai Margalit
2009: Danish Ethical Demands and French Common Goods: Two Moral Philosophies, Alasdair MacIntyre
2008: Ethics for Communication, Onora O’Neill
Journal of Applied Philosophy 2011 Article Prize Winner
Posted by Lisa Evans in Journal Club, Research, Teaching & Learning on March 22, 2012
The editors of the Journal of Applied Philosophy are pleased to announce the winner of the 2011 annual article prize. Congratulations to Jakob Elster who was awarded the £1000 prize for his article How Outlandish Can Imaginary Cases Be?
The Journal of Applied Philosophy will continue to award an annual prize of £1000 to the best article published in the year’s volume. The judgement as to the best article will be made by the editors of the journal; the Society for Applied Philosophy annual lecture, published in the journal, will not be eligible for the prize of best article.
New Naturalistic Philosophy Editor for Philosophy Compass
Posted by Liam Cooper (Managing Editor) in Event, Teaching & Learning, Viewpoint on March 15, 2012
We’re delighted to announce the appointment of the new editor of the Naturalistic Philosophy section of Philosophy Compass, Edouard Machery.
Edouard is Associate Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, a Fellow of the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, and a member of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (Pittsburgh-CMU). His research focuses on the philosophical issues raised by psychology and cognitive neuroscience with a special interest in concepts, moral psychology, the relevance of evolutionary biology for understanding cognition, modularity, the nature, origins, and ethical significance of prejudiced cognition, and the methods of psychology and cognitive neuroscience. He has published more than 60 articles and chapters on these topics in venues such as Analysis, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Cognition, Mind & Language, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Philosophical Studies, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, and Philosophy of Science. He is the author of Doing without Concepts (OUP, 2009), and he has been an associate editor of The European Journal for Philosophy of Science since 2009. He is also involved in the development of experimental philosophy, having published several noted articles in this field.
The Atheist’s Guide to Reality
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Although it came out late last year, Alex Rosenberg’s book, The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions hasn’t been getting the press it deserves. Indeed, the comparative attention lavished on Alain de Botton’s much less interesting Religion for Atheists seems downright unfair. Probably Rosenberg’s title is largely to blame. He has all but admitted choosing it as a marketing ploy. This was probably a mistake. The title does the book no justice, since one thing The Atheist’s Guide has relatively little to say about is atheism. This has led people like this Independent reviewer to focus on complaining that the book offers little to atheists (more sensitive to logical solecisms than de Botton, Rosenberg declines to offer them religion) while ignoring its real topic.
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50th Anniversary of the Southern Journal of Philosophy
Posted by Liam Cooper (Managing Editor) in Research, Viewpoint on March 12, 2012
The Southern Journal of Philosophy is celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2012! To commemorate this milestone and to honor all of those who have sustained this distinctive forum for the past half-century, each of the issues in this year’s volume has been specially commissioned, guest-edited, and dedicated to a timely topic from one of the areas in which the SJP regularly publishes (analytic philosophy, continental philosophy, and history of philosophy):
- 50.1: “Epistemic Coherentism,” ed. Ted Poston
- 50.2: “Continental Philosophy: What and Where Will It Be?” ed. Ted Toadvine
- 50.3: “Newton and Newtonianism,” ed. Mary Domski
- 50.4: “Relativism about Value,” eds. Max Kölbel and Dan Zeman
Together, these issues will offer a “state of the discipline” look at key debates in contemporary philosophy.To be alerted when new issues publish, visit the SJP homepage and click “Get New Content Alerts” from the top left Journal Tools menu.
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New Editor-in-Chief for Philosophy Compass
Posted by Liam Cooper (Managing Editor) in Event, Teaching & Learning, Viewpoint on February 24, 2012
We’re delighted to announce the appointment of the new chief editor of Philosophy Compass, Elizabeth Barnes, who will be coming on as of today and continuing the great work begun by Brian Weatherson. Elizabeth is an Associate Professor in the department of philosophy at the University of Leeds. Her research interests are split between metaphysics and ethics. In metaphysics, she’s written on indeterminacy, emergence, truthmaking, and the open future. In ethics, her work has focused on disability and wellbeing.
The team would also like to extend their warm thanks and appreciation to Brian for the leadership and vision he has shown in the 6 years since launch. During his tenure, the journal has gone from being a largely unknown online novelty to now playing a unique and respected role in philosophical scholarship.
Welcome Elizabeth, and thanks Brian!
Are We Turning into Commodities?
Posted by fullyfleshed in Viewpoint on February 23, 2012
Slavoj Žižek, in a recent London Review of Books article, alleges that the capitalist mode of generating wealth has changed. Money can still be made through the production of material goods – but the big bucks are now being made by privatizing everyday life and leasing it back to consumers. So, for example,
“…Microsoft has imposed itself as an almost universal standard, practically monopolising the field [of computational technology], as one embodiment of what Marx called the ‘general intellect’, by which he meant collective knowledge in all its forms”
This example evinces what we can usefully think of as the capitalization in part of Wittgensteinian ‘forms of life’. A ‘form of life’ is a useful heuristic for capturing a community’s shared biological and cultural background, in terms of traditional and entrenched patterns of behaviour, in a single phrase. Žižek’s point is that these patterns of behaviour, which form the ‘general intellect’, are being exapted: parts are being adopted, built upon, and changed to create a new pattern of behaviour, which are then rented out or sold to consumers.
New from Philosophy Compass:- The Concept of Sovereignty in Contemporary Continental Political Philosophy Verena Erlenbusch
- Agamben’s Fictions Colin McQuillan
- Berkeley and God in the Quad Melissa Frankel
- Foundational Semantics I: Descriptive Accounts Manuel García-Carpintero
- Foundational Semantics II: Normative Accounts Manuel García-Carpintero
- Is There a Distinctively Feminist Philosophy of Religion? Elizabeth D. Burns
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