Month: January 2013

Dan Smith at MUN this week.

Really looking forward to this:

This week, Daniel Smith (Purdue University) will give the fifth Bradley Memorial Lecture, “Time, Truth, and Thought.”

Thursday, January 24, 5-6:30 PM, Room: A-1046.

Abstract: This paper will examine the intersecting of the themes of temporality and truth in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. For the ancients,truth was something eternal: what was true was true in all times and in all places. Temporality (coming to be and passing away) was the realm of the mutable, not the eternal. In the seventeenth century, change began to be seen in a positive light (progress, evolution, etc.), but this change was seen to be possible only because of the immutable laws of nature that govern change. Deleuze argues that it was in Kant that a revolution took place in the conception of time, which Deleuze will take up and explore in his own manner. On the one hand, in Deleuze, time, freed from its subordination to movement, now becomes autonomous: it is the pure form of change (continuous variation) that lies at the basis of Deleuze’s metaphysics inDifference and Repetition (and is explored more thematically in The Time-Image). As a result, on the other hand, the false, freed from its subordination to the form of the true, assumes a power of its own (the power of the false), which in turn implies a new “analytic of the concept” that Deleuze develops in What is Philosophy?
Dan will also be our guest presenter at the Jockey Club on Friday, Jan 25 and has suggested that we look at a piece by Ian Hacking, “Making Up People“.
We are meeting, as per usual, at 5:00 PM, Peter Easton Pub. 

Colloquium Series at MUN

This is the faculty series running Tuesdays. We will also have a full schedule of outside speakers coming in, including Dan Smith (Purdue) next week.

The Department of Philosophy’s Annual Winter Colloquium, 2013

‘What is Metaphysics?’

(C-4036, 2:00-3:15)

Jennifer Flynn

“Metaphysics and Ethics – Are there Moral Principles?”

Tuesday, January 22

Michelle Rebidoux

“Metaphysics and Philosophy of Religion: Four Strategies of Response to Heidegger”

Tuesday, January 29

John Scott

“First Person Metaphysics”

Tuesday, February 5

Suma Rajiva

“Metaphysics and Morals in Kant”

Tuesday, February 12

Peter Harris

“What Can We Say About Being?”

Tuesday, February 26

Scott Johnston

“Firstness in Thirdness: the Place of Chance and Other Ineffables in the Peircean Triad”

Tuesday, March 5

Walter Okshevsky

“Why We Live in a Post-Metaphysical World”

Tuesday, March 12

David Thompson

“Kinds of Reality”

Tuesday, March 19

Antoinette Stafford

“Metaphysics and Intuition: Hegel and Jacobi”

Tuesday, March 26

Peter Gratton

“Derrida’s Metaphysics”

Tuesday, April 2

Jockey Club to meet today instead

Given the stopping of the whole city yesterday–where most of us didn’t have electric–we will have the meeting today at the Peter Easton. Brian happened to give a great paper at the Pub during the blizzard on Thursday, and I expect a lot of that conversation to continue. From Gil Shalev:

Our visitor, Dr. Brian Henning, was scheduled to fly out today but the YYT is still not in full operation and his flight has been pushed to tomorrow. Seeing that he is still with us for another day, we are going to try and and take advantage of this situation and hold yesterday’s scheduled Jockey, today. I know it is rather ‘last minute’ folks, but we are trying to make the best out of this ‘weather-mess’. If you can make it, that will be great.
So, today January 12, 5PM at Peter Easton Pub.
The AN Whitehead chapter from Process and Reality is still up on my google docs. Please see here:

My courses this semester…

I am updating the syllabi (especially the secondary resources), but I have two courses this semester, one on time (and later its relation to politics) at the undergraduate level, and another on Derrida at the 4th year/postgraduate level. The latter will focus on Derrida’s relation to metaphysics, in particular on time, which means that the former course is very much in tandem with the latter, and will lead to a colloquium paper to be presented at MUN in the last week of the semester on Derrida’s “Metaphysics.”

Leiter is right…

Being a tenure-track or tenured prof is not exactly the coal mines. He writes:

though the original analysis of the point in Forbes was sloppy, but the resulting “controversy” tells us more about how little tenure-stream faculty know about what other jobs in the capitalist system are like than about the stresses of being a professor.  The crucial facts are that tenure-stream faculty have considerable autonomy and considerable control over when and where they work, even if they are working fifty hours or more per week.  The same can not be said for lawyers, most doctors, office workers, business men and women of all stripes, and so on.

Reading the comments thread was dispiriting.