RPE Lecturers in Turin

Dave and I attended the CESNUR 2010 International Conference in Turin on 'Changing Gods: Between Religion and Everyday Life' from 9-11 September.  Apart from wine and pizza we heard papers on New Religious Movements from some of the leading scholars in the field, rubbed shoulders with practising Mormon, Unification Church and Family (Children of God) members and learned all about vampires and spiritual therianthropy.  Dave and I will be sharing more of our adventures in due course.

The Examined Life

Hi.

For any new RPE students struggling to find resources for the Induction Project - see http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/examined_life/ where you can access a fair few reviews f of the film.

The trailer is below, and http://www.epistemelinks.com/Main/MainPers.aspx can help you track down info on the individual thinker you have chosen for the presentation; although not all are there - but Cornel West is on twitter ( http://twitter.com/cornelwest ), and I am sure you can use that google-thing...

enjoy...

dave

Welcome!

So - another year...

A big welcome back to all existing RPE students, and an equally excessive welcome to all our new Religion, Philosophy & Ethics students. We will be seeing you all week - but do browse these blog archives to get more of a sense of the course.

The presentation below gives details about the opportunities for travel, that I mentioned during the main Humanities Induction talk... (press the 'play' button > )

contact me on dwebster@glos.ac.uk for more details...

Cheers,

Dave

Humanities Induction on Prezi

Philosophy in the city (and village)

Famous Liverpool Sophists

Those misguided amongst you who thought Athens was the birthplace of philosophy are wrong: it was Liverpool (remember Plato's Cavern?), and to celebrate this fact there is a two-week Philosophy in the City festival which will bring many leading philosophers to a number of cultural centres in Liverpool. It starts on 10th October. If you're looking for something a little more local then the birthplace of Hobbes, the Cotswold village of Malmesbury, has its Thomas Hobbes Festival of Ideas from 14th-16th October. And, if you really want to be even more local than that, the Cheltenham Literature Festival (8th - 17th October) has a number of philosophical, or philosophically-related, talks.

So plenty of things going on in October!

Mocking?

I noticed at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11300552 that:

"An ice cream company banned from using an advert displaying a pregnant nun has vowed to position similar posters in London in time for the Pope's visit.

Antonio Federici's advert showed a pregnant nun eating ice cream in a church, together with the strap line "immaculately conceived".

The Advertising Standards Authority has ordered it to be discontinued, saying it mocked Roman Catholic beliefs."

I have reproduced the image here: is this really offensive?

Flickr updates

Just a quick note: have finally begun to add some stuff to the RPE Flickr page (see widget to the right) - or http://www.flickr.com/photos/58244916@N00/ - hope to add some more soon...

The Politics of Health Care

I read this article a few weeks ago now from the New Yorker and was both moved and impressed by it. Its content is very powerful, and if you are disturbed by stories of the dying, then I wouldn't suggest you read it, but if you do have the courage and the time (it isn't short), then I would really recommend you do.

What struck me when I was reading it were two very powerful ideas. One is that all of us try and escape in our lives the inevitable fact we are going to die, and this is the one event that none of us can avoid. Yet, precisely because we run away from it, we never think about it. We have lost, as the writer of the article says, the art of dying, which is, as the classical philosophers knew, is just as important as living, and indeed might be the secret, paradoxically, of life itself. The second idea is that we spend all this money in the health service in the West to escape the inevitability of death even though we do not know how to die, whereas in the rest of the world the majority of the human race are dying of diseases that are perhaps curable. To me this is a much more serious question than philosophers normally talk about when discussing the ethics of dying. I am not really interested in the endless debates about whether euthanasia is good or a bad thing (if you were to push me in a corner, then I would probably agree with voluntary euthanasia, but I am aware of the problems with that as well), but how health care in the West eats up the resources of our planet just to keep us alive for another couple of months.

Bullfighting banned in Catalonia...

So here we have a clear contrast between claims for cultural value, and claims of universal animal rights... - how do we disentangle them?

Fox news (!) has a view HERE and the usual BBC Have Your Say crowd are HERE

More detail is HERE

The Philosophy Society - July

The next meeting for the philosophy reading group will be Thursday, 1st July at 6pm. As always we will meet at 5.55pm at the entrance to the SU Bar at Park Campus. Paul Caddle is leading the meeting and will be presenting a paper entitled 'What actually is Buddhism?' The discussion does not require any preparatory reading other than a hand-out which will be distributed on the night. So there is not a reason not to come (not even World Cup because we finish at 7.30pm). I look forward to a highly attended and high-spirted discussion.


Shelley

Metal Madnness...

http://conferencealerts.com/seeconf.mv?q=ca16as3a

Heavy Fundametalisms: Can I Play with Madness? Metal, Dissonance, Madness and Alienation

8 to 10 November 2010
Prague, Czech Republic

Now THAT is a conference topic!

Wish I could go...
Would like to do something on NWOBHM, but not sure there's an audience for my paper on Tygers of Pan Tang...

See http://r-p-e.blogspot.com/2007/11/philosophy-and-popular-culture.html
for more on Philosophy and Popular Culture

d.

Exams and Cheating

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jun/15/exam-cheating-brain-food May interest some here!

The Severn Forum Annual Lecture

Wednesday 16 June, 7.45pm

http://www.thesevernforum.org.uk/

Is turning off the aid to poor countries the right Christian response?

Revd Professor Michael Taylor
Emeritus Professor of Social Theology,
University of Birmingham

Main Lecture Theatre, The Park Campus,
University of Gloucestershire
£3 to the public. Free to members and students

Contact: Patricia Downes ( pdownes@glos.ac.uk )

The Philosophy Society

Dr. Emily Ryall from Oxstalls Campus is giving a paper and opening a discussion for the reading group on Thursday, 3rd June. The abstract and reading links are posted below. Remember we are now meeting at the earlier time of 6pm, so meet outside the SU Bar at Park Campus at 5.55pm. The Gallery Room is now closed for the summer and I am still awaiting the booking for a seminar room. I am unable to come tomorrow evening but you will be under the excellent charge of Emily. Is anybody willing to collect the key from security? If somebody could volunteer for this small but important detail, please let me know.

Shelley

Being-for-oneself and being-for-others in sport: An existentialist critique.

I have argued in a previous paper (Ryall 2008) that sport seems to provide an area whereby the nature of being is intensely illuminated; for we are always aware that it is something that is voluntarily engaged in and has no meaning beyond that which we give it. In addition to this, the nature of sport provides a stage upon which the free choices we make are wholly visible both to ourselves and to others, and the emotions of pride and shame, contempt and respect (of varying degrees) are common. Such emotions, according to Sartre, demonstrate the on-going battle between ourselves and others to be authentic and in good-faith, and not fall foul of self deception nor the reduction of oneself by another to a mere object. As such, this paper will attempt to apply some existentialist (mainly Sartrean)ideas regarding authenticity and good-faith to the world of sport, and will consider whether Sartre’s notion of ‘the look’ exposes the problem of these emotions and the way we view ourselves and others in sport.

For my previous, 2008, paper on the nature of being a substitute in sport see: HERE
For an earlier draft of the paper being presented see: HERE

Research Seminar - Metaphysical Sporting Value

Research Seminar (all welcome)

Tuesday 1^st June

11am-12pm

Oxstalls TC217

Metaphysical Sporting Value – Carl Thomen

Why do you play sport? Is it to compete and to win, or is there something more to it than that? Did you know that sport can:

(i) Be a source of self-affirmation?[1]

(ii) Reveal the extent to which humans can truly be said to be free and responsible?[2]

(iii) Be beautiful in its promotion of a greater harmony and balance in one’s life?[3]

[1] There will be no mention here of the type of self-motivating confidence speak you would see on a Tony Robbins Show (“You can do it! You are a special little flower ready to bloom blah blah blah”). This I promise.

2 Woohoo! You are not a slave to the deterministic force of physical causality! (This thought may cause you to want to get drunk in celebration. I am willing to overlook this cause and effect relationship)

3 No Buddhist monks (and probably only three of four hippies) will be hurt during this presentation

---

[1] There will be no mention here of the type of self-motivating confidence speak you would see on a Tony Robbins Show (“You can do it! You are a special little flower ready to bloom blah blah blah”). This I promise.

[2] Woohoo! You are not a slave to the deterministic force of physical causality! (This thought may cause you to want to get drunk in celebration. I am willing to overlook this cause and effect relationship)

[3] No Buddhist monks (and probably only three of four hippies) will be hurt during this presentation.

Gloucestershire Philosophical Society:

Wednesday, May 12th. 2010, 7.30.p.m. FCH, Room HC203.

(Cheltenham, University of Gloucestershire, Swindon Road)

Dr. Jane Monkton-Smith, University of Gloucestershire, will talk on:

"Narratives of Sex, Death and Gender".

Based on her recently published book, Jane applies the methodology of French philosopher Michel Foucault to better understand the practices of rape and murder.

All welcome.