Top News, Articles, and Interviews in Philosophy

Plato’s Parmenides

15. January 2020 Philosophy News News
[Revised entry by Samuel Rickless on January 14, 2020. Changes to: Bibliography] The Parmenides is, quite possibly, the most enigmatic of Plato's dialogues. The dialogue recounts an almost certainly fictitious conversation between a venerable Parmenides (the Eleatic Monist) and a youthful Socrates, followed by a dizzying array of interconnected arguments presented by Parmenides to a young and compliant interlocutor named "Aristotle" (not the philosopher, but rather a man who became one of the Thirty [More]
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The problem of consciousness

14. January 2020 Philosophy News News
Many people find consciousness deeply puzzling. It is often described as one of the few remaining problems for science to address that is genuinely deep—perhaps even unsolvable. Indeed, consciousness is thought to present a challenge to the prevailing scientific image of the universe as physical through-and-through. In part this puzzlement arises because people are (at […] The post The problem of consciousness appeared first on OUPblog.         Related StoriesHow to address the enigmas of everyday lifeHilary Putnam on mind and meanings – Philosopher of the MonthWomen on the front lines: Military service, combat and [More]
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World Logic Day

14. January 2020 Philosophy News News
Today is World Logic Day. Created by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), it was first celebrated in 2019. Held annually on January 14th, World Logic Day was established to “bring the intellectual history, conceptual significance and practical implications of logic to the attention of interdisciplinary science communities and the broader public.” The celebration aims at fostering international cooperation, promoting the development of logic, in both research and teaching, supporting the activities of associations, universities and other institutions involved with logic, and enhancing public understanding of logic and its implications for science, technology and innovation.  According to Audrey Azoulay, Director General of UNESCO, the date of of January 14th was selected in honour of two great logicians of the twentieth century: Kurt Gödel and Alfred Tarski. Gödel, who died on 14 January 1978, established the incompleteness theorem, which transformed the study of logic in the twentieth century. Tarski, who was born on 14 January 1901, developed theories which interacted with those of Gödel. There’s some more information about the day here. For World Logic Day I’ve gathered some logic-related posts from over the past few years at Daily Nous, starting with this: These drawings of logicians, initially posted about here, are by Matt Leadbetter. They were commissioned by the Open Logic Project, the home of a [More]
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Aristotle's Revenge: The Metaphysical Foundations of Physical and Biological Science

14. January 2020 Philosophy News News
2020.01.02 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews Edward Feser, Aristotle's Revenge: The Metaphysical Foundations of Physical and Biological Science, Editiones Scholasticae, 2019, 515pp, $29.90 (pbk), ISBN 9783868382006. Reviewed by Monte Ransome Johnson, University of California, San Diego "Scholasticism" usually refers to the presupposition of a single philosophy taught in the universities of late medieval Europe, a presupposition found useful by philosophers working outside those universities in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. As such "there is, strictly speaking, no such thing as Scholasticism",[1] but the tag "Scholasticism" was later adopted by self-styled neo-Scholastics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who remained committed to doctrines whose origins can be traced back to Aristotle. It may now be necessary to speak of neo-neo-Scholasticism, since Edward Feser attempts to revive neo-Scholasticism, presented as a sequel to his Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction (Editiones Scholasticae, 2014). This new book "builds on the main ideas... Read [More]
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David Efird (1974-2020)

13. January 2020 Philosophy News News
David Efird, senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of York, died unexpectedly last Thursday. Dr. Efird worked in philosophy of religion, analytic theology, metaphysics, and epistemology. He had taught philosophy at York since 2002, and at the time of his death was the principal of one of the university’s colleges. He earned his D.Phil at Oxford University and his undergraduate degree at Duke University. He also studied at Princeton Theological Seminary and the University of Edinburgh. He became a priest in 2011. You can learn more about his work here and here. The post David Efird (1974-2020) appeared first on Daily [More]
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How to value your time and not just your money

13. January 2020 Philosophy News News
For the Ancient Greeks, the Good Life depended on how you could use your time. Their idea of time differed from modern thinking. They divided it into four categories. They distinguished between labour, activities done for pay or as a slave, which they avoided, and work, activities done around the home, in philia (civic friendship), associated with care, craftsmanship and creativity. And they distinguished between recreation, mainly physical activities, sport and participating in drama, from which they learned the values of empathy and compassion, and leisure or schole, the combination of participation in public political life and education, in the broad civilising sense of the term.Progress was measured in how much time could be devoted to schole, particularly public action in the agora, the commons, in which citizens could forge morality and the capacity to be political. Vitally, it was recognised that this required deliberation and learning. A special place was also given to what [More]
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Summer Programs in Philosophy for Graduate Students – 2020

13. January 2020 Philosophy News News
This is a post for the listing of summer programs in philosophy for graduate students. If you are organizing such a program, please add a comment to this post that includes the program name, dates, location, contact information, application deadline, a description of the program, and a link to further information, like so: Central European University Summer Schools in Philosophy 1 – Identity: Logic and Metaphysics July 27 – August 1, 2020 CEU Budapest Campus Application Deadline: February 14, 2020 Description: This 6-day research-oriented course is designed to familiarize participants with the latest advances in the philosophical debates about identity and related matters. The specific topics to be discussed will be the logic of identity and identity and modality; identity and essence; identity and indiscernibility; time, composition and identity; and personal identity. The course will be delivered by five leaders in their fields, and they will not only introduce those topics but also discuss their latest research on them. Participants will not only be able to interact with the course faculty in the classroom, but also during course breaks, and during lunch and dinner. The course will follow a seminar format, and classes will be interactive with active involvement from the participants. There will be readings assigned for each class and the participants will be expected to familiarize themselves with the topics by reading the material. The course is open to [More]
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Why the foundations of physics have not progressed for 40 years

13. January 2020 Philosophy News News
In the foundations of physics, we have not seen progress since the mid 1970s when the standard model of particle physics was completed. Ever since then, the theories we use to describe observations have remained unchanged. Sure, some aspects of these theories have only been experimentally confirmed later. The last to-be-confirmed particle was the Higgs-boson, predicted in the 1960s, measured in 2012. But all shortcomings of these theories – the lacking quantization of gravity, dark matter, the quantum measurement problem, and more – have been known for more than 80 years. And they are as unsolved today as they were then. The major cause of this stagnation is that physics has changed, but physicists have not changed their methods. As physics has progressed, the foundations have become increasingly harder to probe by experiment. Technological advances have not kept size and expenses manageable. This is why, in physics today, we have collaborations of thousands of people operating [More]
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Tutorial Teacher Ethics of Technology (junior lecturer) TU/e Eindhoven April - July 2020 (part time 0,3 FTE)

13. January 2020 Philosophy News News
Job List:  Europe Name of institution:  Eindhoven University of Technology Town:  Eindhoven Country:  Netherlands Job Description:  Job description The Lecturer will be expected to assist in teaching a compulsory introductory course on ethics of technology for first year engineering students. The lecturer will work in a team of lecturers and support the main lecturer by giving tutorials and grading student work. Job requirements Candidates are expected to have a Masters or Ph.D degree in philosophy, preferably in the field of ethics, applied ethics, ethics of technology or philosophy of technology, and have proven expertise in teaching philosophy courses. Conditions of [More]
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