The Philosophy Society: November

After another date change, the philosophy reading group will be meeting Thursday, 12th November at Park Campus. However, we will not meet in The Gallery Room. We will have a seminar room as we had for the summer meetings. Our best bet is to meet in front of the SU Bar at 6.55pm and go from there.

This month we will be discussing "The Theses on Feuerbach" by Karl Marx. Why not also have a look at Feuerbach and Hegel (with your extra time) as Marx is responding to the philosophical armchair tendency of 'interpreting' rather than 'changing'? The link: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.pdf

If you have too much time on your hands (about two minutes), have a look at this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ovgccxfEq8&feature=related

Look forward to having a rousing discussion tomorrow evening,

Shelley

Religious Movements list

The University of Virginia has a great page at http://web.archive.org/web/20060902232910/religiousmovements.lib.virginia.edu/profiles/listalpha.htm giving profiles for a huge number of religious movements: be it the Amish, Falun Gong, Jesus Army, UFO cults or Zoroastrianism - they are all there...
Enjoy...

d.

Abraham and the Sacrifice of his Son in the three Abrahamic Faiths

The University is joining the Al Mahdi Institute in Birmingham in an exploration of the topic of Sacrifice in the three Abrahamic faiths: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The focus is a single text: the story of Abraham's near-sacrifice of his son, which is told in the Scriptures of all three faiths (Genesis 22; Sura 12) and developed in their art and literature.

Professors Melissa Raphael and Gordon McConville from the Humanities Department will consider the text from the perspective of Judaism and Christianity respectively, while Dr. Ian Williams of Al Mahdi will do so from the perspective of Islam.

The event will take place at Francis Close Hall on 16th November from 11.15 in the Chapel Side Room. All are welcome.

To register, please contact Patricia Downes, pdownes@glos.ac.uk

Autumn is a time for paradox and punishment..

As the nights draw in, and summertime evening frolics become less feasible, our students, no doubt, are turning to more cerebral means to pass the evening hours. One way might be to consider the paradox at http://peasoup.typepad.com/peasoup/2009/10/smilanskys-nonpunishment-paradox.html which I thought interesting.

PEAsoup is good blog, which often has things of note on it - but I thought this, albeit drawn from a book (by Saul Smilansky) - was worth pointing out. I won't explain more - in the name of maintaining the suspense till you get to the actual site...

Best enjoyed in a leather armchair, with sherry and a cat while looking out at the quickening dark of the Cotswolds (or not).
d.

It is Never to Late to Learn

As I said to my students in RPE101, Philosophical and Ethical Arguing (and probably scaring them a little, though that was unintentional), you have to own your own learning, by which I meant you have to transform yourself from a passive to an active learner.

Of course this phrase 'active and passive learner' is a fine example of gobbledygook (even though it is beloved of our university), but even jargon can hide a kernel of truth. I was reading on the train that morning of an emeritus professor who is still working at the age of 90 (you can read the article here if you want to).

What inspired me wasn't his age (though it's impressive), but how he talked about his experience as a student. He said,

"It's really about whether you want to learn. There's a fundamental difference between being taught and learning yourself, which is what you've got to do to reach a really high standard."

"Learning for yourself", well that is what research is, and should't that be what we teach above all?

The Ethicist

Ethical advice via podcast?
"Randy Cohen, Times Magazine columnist, answers readers' questions on ethical issues each week."


I enjoyed some - but the phrase "Cake-free workplace"? : only in America...

d.

Philosophy Society Update

The October meeting for the Philosophy Society will be held on the 8th, at 7pm in The Gallery Room above the SU Bar at Park Campus. All following meetings will fall on the first Thursday of the month.

I found an interesting dialogue on "Before the Law" that you may like:

http://www.herzogbr.net/kafka/before-discussion1.htm

Also, an allegorical similarity has been drawn between "Before the Law" and the Seinfeld episode "The Chinese Restaurant", where entrance is obstructed by what appears to be an amorphous set of temporal circumstances (note how bribery and charm are used to seduce "the gatekeeper" in Kafka and in Seinfeld). What do you think? Is it fair to draw a comparison between the two? Here are the links to the episode (each about seven minutes):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnoV45-1bJE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnqDAMKDN74&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzUUAdAvQIA&feature=related

The link to "Before the Law" is:

http://records.viu.ca/~Johnstoi/Kafka/beforethelaw.htm

And Derrida's essay "Law of Genre":

http://mission17.org/documents/Derrida_LawOfGenre.pdf

Any questions or comments can be made here or to Shelley s0510427@glos.ac.uk

What is the difference?

Christian refuses to remove crucifix (at work): http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/devon/8265321.stm

Jedi refuses to remove hood (in Tesco): http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/18/jedi-religion-tesco-hood-jones

Are the issues the same?

Dawkins on Science

I read this in the Guardian the other day. Though, as students in RPE 201 know (Philosophy, Science and Belief), I am not an ardent fan of his, I do believe he’s absolute right about this, when he writes about scientists,

"Scientists often disagree with one another, sometimes passionately. But they don't go to court to sort out their differences, they go into the lab, repeat the experiments, carefully examine the controls and the statistical analysis. We care about whether something is true, supported by the evidence. We are not interested in whether somebody sincerely believes he is right. There exist objective methods for discovering whether he is, as a matter of fact, right. If he is wrong, the evidence will show it, and – notwithstanding Judge Eadie – be blowed to whether he is sincere in his error or not."

Not quite sure what he means by ‘blowed’, but it’s a pretty accurate description of what scientists do as opposed to pseudo-scientists.

If you want to read more go to http://tinyurl.com/nok3ur

Schopenhauer and Love - by Alain de Botton; and Zizek too...

Interesting - but is it that persuasive?




OR...

Slavoj Zizek about love