Fantastic Philosophy Resources at MIT

Massachusetts Institute of Technology have made huge amounts of their 'courseware' available, free, online. This includes a lot of philosophy materials. For example, see HERE for lectures notes on a range of topics including the Problem of Evil, the Ontological argument, and a range of ethical topics.


There are also video lectures on 'The Philosophy of Love in the Western World' - HERE - which will be of interest to students taking the RPE301, Love Sex and Death course.

Cheers,
Dave

Queen Elizabeth's Mercian School Visit - Ethics..

Last friday [29th Feb] I headed up the delightful M5 and M42 to Queen Elizabeth's Mercian School to talk to Years 11, 12 and 13 (in varying quantities) about various things.

We began with arguments for the existence of God - mainly the Ontological argument. Some suspected I was playing some kind of theological conuring trick - defining things into existence (and treating existence as a predicate) - maybe they were right...

See http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ontological-arguments/ for more on God as a necessary being. We also spoke about the Cosmological argument - and the idea of an unmoved mover... Click HERE for more on that topic..

After lunch, we talked about ethics in general, and dilemmas - such as those at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4954856.stm - and more real life ones such as at http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/greatergood/archive/2006springsummer/halberstam.html

I had a good time - and hope the session were useful - be glad to be back soon.

Cheers,

Dave