Ted Honderich to speak in Cheltenham on War and Terrorism

Gloucestershire Philosophical Society, Summer Term.

Talk on Wednesday22nd. April, 2009, 7.30.p.m. FCH HC203 University of Gloucestershire
Map HERE.

Professor Ted Honderich, UCL

"Terrorisms, Terrorist Wars: A philosophical perspective."

Professor Honderich is an internationally renowned political philosopher; editor of the Oxford Companion to Philosophy, and Chair of the Royal Institute of Philosophy.

All welcome.

Philosophy Society cancellation

Due to weather conditions the Philosophy Society will be cancelled tomorrow night. Everybody now has another month to read Machiavelli's The Prince, slim in size but broad in content. The next meeting will be Thursday, 5th March.

Look forward to a lively debate then!

Shelley




click to enlarge map

Sports, ethics and fairness

Further to recent darts entries, I have been thinking about whether engagement in sport is something that can foster ethical virtues.

It has the rules, and ethics borrows phrases from the world of sports all the time - such as'playing with a straight bat' (a bit archaic I know), level-playing field, fair play, and others [see http://www.aafla.org/SportsLibrary/JSH/JSH1982/JSH0901/jsh0901t.pdf for a piece in the Journal of Sports History about Plato's use of Sporting Analogies in the Lesser Hippias)].

Then I came across this quote from George Orwell:

"Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting."

Oh dear - should we let kids really do PE at school at all?
Dave