Christmas Puzzle Link and usual 'Christmas banned' nonsense

Peter Cave has a Christmas puzzle for the entertainment of philosophers at http://continuumphilosophy.typepad.com/continuum_philosophy/2009/12/guest-post-peter-caves-seasonal-puzzle-1.html - enjoy

See previous links at http://r-p-e.blogspot.com/2007/12/festive-philosophy.html for stories on banning Christmas, etc- expect usual tabloid versions this year too...

Dave

Prezi on Buddhism

Hi. I will be using Prezi on the RPE208 Indian Religions module for the Buddhism aspect next Semester, but thought you'd like to see one by someone else on Buddhism...

Either see below or look at http://prezi.com/dcuu3lcgun15/

Dave

Cheating and Sport?

I am not that interested in professional football; the cultural imperative for all men to attend with irrational gusto to the minutiae of its details leaves me cold, and feeling distanced from it. Nonetheless, I was struck by Guardian sport blog headline:

The night France's philosopher king spat in the face of the common man

Now, the headline seems wholly over the top: but maybe there is something of interest here. I forced myself to read the entry. And, there was indeed something of interest there. The blog author (Paul Hayward) notes that the French coach sees the incident as failure of the referee - and not a matter of cheating. I can see it is a mistake by the referee. To me this is the game and not cheating says the French coach.

The blog author advances more evidence of the same attitude in sport - and this leads him to the view that as far as many players and others are concerned - they should be able to do anything and it is then the job of the match officials to spot and punish rule-breaking. Paul writes:

With each swan dive, handball and feigned injury we have shuffled to the moment where the modern player thinks it is his duty to cheat, and the responsibility of the state to stop him. To Henry and Domenech, this was a failure not of spirit, of fair play or values but of governance

This is interesting. The idea here is that you should do anything you can to win - and the game is to avoid detection. The rules, it implies, are to be enforced onto you, not something you seek to follow from an intrinsic respect for them. Is it fair to say that many feel the same about the law? If we think about a particular part of the law - motoring restrictions (against speeding, parking where we choose, etc) - I think there parallel is quite striking.

To return to sport though, does such a view not mean that cheating is impossible? If you get away with it - that is fine; if you are caught, you are punished and the rules are upheld. I wonder if I feel the same about lying, or stealing...

Comments?

Scared of Gloucestershire...

Some days the news stories seem too much to bear: In the Telegraph, we have a strange piece titled: Let's get it straight: Irish child abuse was perpetrated by the trendy, modern post-Vatican II Catholic Church where the author seems to have been given space to follow his wholly unsubstantiated (to an extent we wouldn't tolerate in an essay) line that liberalising Catholic attitudes to sexuality are the main cause of the child abuse scandal.

Then we read in the Guardian: Uganda considers death sentence for gay sex in bill before parliament : Minimum penalty is life in jail, under anti-homosexuality bill; US evangelists are main activists behind measure - which tops off a pretty bad day for religon in the press...

anyone have any good news?

CNN is putting together a set of videos on this year's Hajj. The first one is below...
D.



If the video does not display above - you can go to: http://us.cnn.com/video/?/video/world/2009/11/21/mecca.streets.walk.talk.cnn

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