PHILOSOPHY IN A TIME OF ERROR

MUN Colloquium Schedule

philosophyinatimeoferror — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 14:44:38 +0000

MUN’S graduate colloquium series on the topic of life is below, meeting Tuesday this semester a 2-3:15 in CHEM 4036. My own lecture will likely only touch briefly on Agamben (along with some Derrida and Esposito) before diving into Aristotle.

Philosophy Winter Colloquium 2012

Jan 17 Stephen Gardner “The Form of Life: Pythagorean Reflections on Modern Biology”

Jan 24 Michelle Rebidoux “The Greatest of These is Love: The Traditional Christian Virtues in Michel

Henry’s Phenomenology of Life”

SPECIAL THURSDAY SESSION

Jan 26 Scott Johnson “Why Kantian Constructivism Fails”

Jan 31 Walter Okshevsky “Kant on Transcendental Self-Understanding and the Vocation of Moral Life”

Feb 7 Bernard Wills “Parmenides, Heraclitus and the Theological Category of Life”

Feb 14 Peter Gratton “Agamben on Aristotle”

SPECIAL THURSDAY SESSION

Feb 16 Christopher Martin TBA

Feb 21 BREAK

Feb 28 Seamus O’Neill “Eritis sicut Dii: Theosis, Pride, and the Dialectic of the Devil in Platonic and Christian Thought”

Mar 6 Peter Harris “Heidegger on Aristotle”

SPECIAL THURSDAY SESSION

Mar 8 Suma Rajiva “Life and Moral Agency”

Mar 13 David Thompson “The Norms of Life”

Mar 20 Arthur Sullivan “The Life of the Sign”

Mar 27 Darren Hynes “The Many Lives of Rene Descartes”

Apr 3 Peter Trnka “Flavor Experience and Heterotrophic Life: How to Chew Gum II”

Review of Walled States, Waning Sovereignty at S&S Open Site

philosophyinatimeoferror — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 21:50:23 +0000

Brown, Wendy 2010 Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, reviewed by Memorial’s own Sarah Kizuk…

Which reminds me: Sarah, among others, will be around for the Spinoza Reading Group. Our weekly starting time will be Mondays at 1:00 in the Kiefte Room.

Courses this Semester

philosophyinatimeoferror — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 20:29:50 +0000

My undergraduate course in Political Philosophy has its page here. I might lose some Rousseau to shoehorn in some Spinoza, given student interest.

The graduate course in political philosophy is here. It’s a survey course of what I’m framing in terms of post-Heideggerian Continental political philosophy. I’m going to try to round up figures to interview, based on grad student questions, scholars of these figures, which I’ll post on this page.

Spinoza Reading Group

philosophyinatimeoferror — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 14:53:52 +0000

We’ll be reading the Theological-Political Treatise and we’ll start up tomorrow (Tuesday) at 12:30 in the Kiefte Room (the dept’s library room next to the dept. office)–feel free to stop by.

Review of Sloterdijk’s Spheres Vol. 1

philosophyinatimeoferror — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 16:09:46 +0000

In the THE by Constantine Sandis, who, like many readers of Sloterdijk, finds him wildly digressive and perhaps in the end superficial. I don’t share that view at all (neither do the writers in new Sloterdijk Now), though I will say Sloterdijk’s prose, often beautiful, is actually at its best when it is digressive and literary, and I find his shorter, more polemical works not well argued and often provocative in the worst sense. (For a taste, see this English translation of what set off his row with Axel Honneth a couple of years ago, which should have gone all the way and just argued for the gold standard.)

IHE article on the APA Smoker

philosophyinatimeoferror — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 17:44:05 +0000

Here. (H/T Leiter) I tried to find online any pictures from the early APAs, which really did involve cigar smoking among an all-male club, but alas, couldn’t spot one. Two reforms are needed:

1. Committees should short list their candidates by using Skype. No one should have to spend $1000 or more to go the APA to have one interview when one is up against fifteen other candidates. The way this is handled in the U.S. is quite different than elsewhere. Memorial brought me to campus. No APA interview. They had a short list, invited the candidates and went from there. I know there’s a value to face-to-face conversations, but it seems to me you can invite more candidates to campus if you cut out the funding needed to send a faculty committee to the APA to do the interviews.

2. Whose idea is it to provide free booze on the first night of the smoker? It’s like a torture test for nervous graduate students. Also, it’s not a good idea for various drunk faculty I’ve seen wandering around, some of whom have been on hiring committees. David Shrader, the exec director of the APA, says as much:

Amidst this hubbub of anxiety, David Schrader, the executive director of the APA, walked around shaking hands and making conversation. …He noted the concerns of some women and said there had been informal discussions at the APA. Some had suggested a cash bar instead of free alcohol as a way of tempering bad behavior by making it a bit difficult to drink too much. …“There are a few who will misbehave,” he said. “We are not sure if we can do anything about the placement process spilling over to a reception or whether we can ask job candidates not to talk to an institution in a social setting.” Schrader said there were plenty of female philosophers who were comfortable at the reception and had not raised the issues mentioned in the blogs.

This a really unfortunate quote: what women have described is an atmosphere in which they are being propositioned by inebriated hiring committee members, which is beyond “misbehav[ing[,” but, you know, runs afoul of a slew of state and federal laws. And even if “plenty” of female philosophers don’t seem to mind (do I need to mention how similar wording has been used to defend many offensive practices far worse than this?), isn’t it enough if even a few say they do indeed mind and quite a bit so?

If women are writing on various blogs that they feel uncomfortable, well isn’t that enough reason to reform this? What could trump that? A reception is obviously fine, but get rid of the tables so that people are mixing more freely.

There are other good reasons anyway. The year I was on the market, I was exhausted from interviewing during the day and getting rid of the tables means you can perhaps give a “hi” or have a short conversation with a department without feeling the need to linger. Also, it means you can avoid having to meet other candidates, which always makes for awkward conversation. (I’ll never forget getting stared down by another candidate while talking to a member of the committee at a smoker. I was just trying to have a pleasant conversation about potential mutual interests and he stared at me, seeming without blinking for many minutes, as if I had killed his cat.)

Spinoza and Naturalism

philosophyinatimeoferror — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 18:28:45 +0000

Another link: Peter Wolfendale has a lengthy (but well worth it) discussion of Spinoza here.

Speaking of Spinoza, we’ll be doing a reading group on Spinoza’s Tractactus Theologico-Politicus at MUN during the winter quarter (if you’re in St. John’s, pop me an email and let me know you’re interested; we’re still figuring out a meeting time and place). Partly in preperation, I’ve been reading Steven Nadler’s A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza’s Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age and and look forward to getting my hands on, when I get back to St. John’s, Hasana Sharp’s Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization, both of which came out in the fall.

Espen Hammer on Time in the Times

philosophyinatimeoferror — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 18:18:51 +0000

Here.

DePaulian Rick Elmore on Object Oriented Ontology

philosophyinatimeoferror — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 18:16:42 +0000

Here.

Final Exams Questions

philosophyinatimeoferror — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 15:08:27 +0000

At Crooked Timber and now at APPS, there’s an ongoing discussion about the use of final exams versus papers. For most upper level courses, I give final papers, though if the class looks like it’s not keeping up with the readings early on, I will switch it to a final. Michael Bérubé notes that it’s less fair to those who have disabilities to give them final exams, but this is a problem easily solved. My son has his own adjustments for his school exams, so it’s something about which I’m unaware, but it’s a problem easily solved: I tell all students they have all the time they need, even if we have to move to another room when the exam period ends. And I mean it: I used to bring long books–now my Kindle—and prepare for a long day of gentle reading. The record stands at a 6.5 hours for a 2-hour exam…

This is for one reason: I get too many papers with various levels of plagiarism and if the paper is meant to test something, then a test it will be. Many students with disabilities will not tell you, so that’s why I tell the whole class they have all the time they need; almost all universities now have disability service offices where students can take their exams anyway. It’s also a system I developed when teaching many, many more students a semester, so certainly papers were out of the question just to have my sanity. And for lower level courses, I get far better essays written in class anyway than if they did them at home; at home it’s the same (generally low) quality, but without the pages of philosopher biographies and “In the history of the world, philosophers have always wondered about the soul” long introductions to read through.