Problem of Evil DVD for schools

Hi.

Just a quick post to note that our popular DVD aimed at schools (particularly those doing GCSE or A Level Religious Studies / Philosophy & Ethics) about the Problem of Evil is now back on sale, at a reduced price - see http://store.glos.ac.uk/browse/extra_info.asp?compid=1&catid=48&modid=1&prodid=355&deptid=6 for details..

Cheers,

Dave

Plato and Love

Students across RPE, but especially those on RPE301 (Love, Sex and Death) may be interested in the following talk, offered by Gloucestershire Philosophical Society:

Wed. Nov. 10th 7.30.p.m. FCH Room HC203. Dr.Angie Hobbs, Associate Professor, University of Warwick. 'Plato and Love'.

Dr. Hobbs is one of the country's leading classical philosophers, and has become the U.K's first Senior Fellow in the Public Understanding of Philosophy.

More details on the GPS website at http://www.glosphilsoc.co.uk/whatson.html

Our students are very welcome at their meetings..

d.

Meeting re Field Trip to Spain - room/time/etc

Hi.

If you are interested in coming on the field trip to Cordoba (and Seville) in March 2011, you need to attend the meeting tomorrow:

Thursday 14th October at 12 noon, HC201 (FCH)

if you cannot make the meeting - just send me an email - dwebster@glos.ac.uk - and I will register your desire to come on the trip...

http://r-p-e.blogspot.com/2010/04/rpe136-cordoba-trip-2010.html

http://r-p-e.blogspot.com/2009/03/cordoba-field-trip.html

There is no God

Some of you might have heard of the recent brouhaha surrounding Stephen Hawking's announcement that we don't need God any more. I am always surprised how what is taken to be novel and revolutionary has in fact been said before, and countless times before. Didn't Laplace once reply to Napoleon, many years ago, that God was a hypothesis that we no longer required? Has it taken this long to be heard by our newspapers?

Of course this is absurd thought. No it isn't even absurd. It is just plain stupid. Unfortunately, being a physicist does not make one a good philosopher (or a philosopher of any sort), and it is equally unfortunate that Professor Hawking thinks that philosophy is dead (the 'love of wisdom' dead? Who would wish such a thing?), for he might have otherwise actually bothered to read some philosophy.

The scientific idea (and that is what it is) that the universe requires God to exist probably has its origin, at least in our culture, more in Aristotle's Physics, than it does it any religious text. Does Hawking serious think that the first book of Genesis, for example, is meant to be read as a cosmology? (but then since he thinks philosophy is not worth reading, he's not likely to read theology either).

Just as much as we shouldn't trust a creationist's statements on physics, we should not take it for granted that a scientist knows much about anything accept science, and the belief that science knows everything, or that a 'theory of everything' really does contain everything, is precisely that a belief and not a scientific theory at all.

For those of you who want to think (and our students on RPE 201, Religion, Science and Belief might want to) about these issues a bit more, and might even have the slight feeling that philosophy is not quite as dead as Hawking wants it to be, would not be wasting their time in reading this article by Carlin Romano in The Chronicle.

Studying Religion, Philosophy & Ethics at University

This Saturday sees one of our biggest Open Days (info: here), and I will be doing my bit, talking about what it is like to study religious, philosophical and ethical ideas, especially on our course here at University of Gloucestershire...

In discussing what I was planing to say, with a colleague, I was saying that I always get a what's the point? question: often framed in terms of what type of job a degree like this might lead graduates toward, but also - on occasion - in more general terms.. (His response, by the way, was the surely that a student who had studied philosophy, in particular, could do anything - I liked that answer...)

But it got me thinking...

Of course, on one level, I think "what's the point of studying anything else?" - the things we cover seem so vital, so central to what it means to be a human being, that the question is hard to get one's head round...

But: not everyone feels quite the same as we do about the topic - so beyond the intrinsic value of studying RPE, what does it give students? Of course, it gives them lots of analytical and critical skills, the ability to appreciate complex ideas, to deal with conceptually difficult material, to explain exactly what they mean, and to understand and articulate a range of religious notions. It provides them with the confidence to robustly defend points of view, verbally, or in written form, and the ability to revise their points of view as they see fit.

But, and I think this is very much true when I look at, and talk to, our graduates, it seems to make them thoughtful, especially when it comes to matters that impact on other people. By which, I think what I will say at the Open Day tomorrow is that we really strive, in a way that many other disciplines perhaps do not, to make our students better people.

This may seem odd, and we certainly don't tell them what to think (not that they'd listen - they often are rather argumentative and independent-minded [which is a good thing]) - but we do tell them that it is their duty to think; and that the ideas on the course will challenge them to produce an ethical response...

A J Ayer on YouTube

Now that's proper TV... A J Ayer on Logical Positivism...

While our RPE students may enjoy this - thought that I'd pop on the blog - as this seems even better than X Factor, Strictly Come Dancing and Wife Swap all put together...

[Not to mention how odd smoking on TV looks in the clips]

Ayodhya Decision...

The BBC is reporting:

A court in India has said that a disputed holy site in Ayodhya should be split between Hindus and Muslims, lawyers for the Hindu petitioners say.

However in a majority verdict, judges gave control of the main disputed section, where a mosque was torn down in 1992, to Hindus, lawyers said.

Other parts of the site will be controlled by Muslims and a Hindu sect.

You can read the Guardian's 10-year-ago feature on this - with some helpful background, at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/sep/28/ayodhya-mosque-india-guardian-report

Also see: http://gu.com/p/2k36h

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