We had our last Filmosophy of the semester last night - Hanno showed Starship Troopers and discussed Plato's Republic thereafter. For those of you never subjected to the film, it's about space bugs and a facistic society that actually offers strong parallels to Plato's dialogue. Hanno did an excellent job, we had a great turnout, and this is promising for future presentations.
We also got great news regarding the Philosophy minor and major - our Dean is eager to get the programs up and running, and we will probably be attaching formal education in philosophy onto an existent degree run through the History department (a Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Studies). We will be meeting with the Dean and a few History faculty to discuss the logistics early next semester, and should be able to get the program into the catalogue for the 2010-2011 academic year. While this is not a full BA in Philosophy, it is a huge step towards it, and is a lot faster than we had anticipated.
Once the grading is done, I'll take a few days to decompress and begin the trek up to Pittsburgh. Google Maps tells me its about 19 hours to complete, but that's negotiable depending upon traffic patterns. We have higher speed limits down here. :-) I'll probably find a cheap room in Tennessee for an evening and stop again in Ohio. The specifics are still be worked out, but I'll keep everyone up to date.
The work continues to keep me busy - I'm still working on the biodiversity project, and it is clear that it will be an interesting task to compress all of this material into a cogent and brief presentation. And I mean objectively brief, not brief by my standards. Additionally, I'm working my way through articles for a book on empirical ethics - i.e., how we can take clinical and social science evidence and use it in ethical reasoning. There has historically been conflict between the social sciences and philosophy, principally revolving around the "Is-Ought" question: can we take a descriptive statement about the world and turn it into a prescriptive statement? As an example, there is a world of difference between the descriptive statement "I have blue eyes" and the prescriptive statement "I should have blue eyes" - in this case, "should" adds additional value information beyond simple description. In the context of ethics questions, there is a difference between "This is how people behave" and "This is how people should behave". I'm not planning a definitive answer to this question for two reasons:
- The fact-value (is-ought) distinction has been remarkably resistant to efforts to get around it. It's not impossible, but it would require the book to be a lot larger and less accessible to its target audience.
- Philosophy is contractually obligated not to give definitive answers, since we would then be out of jobs.
I'm planning to use the downtime during the break to contact hospitals in Lake Charles, as there are two more research studies at UPMC in which I am involved. The research lead and I have also been discussing an ethics article regarding a framework for potentially viable organ transplantation, but the ball is currently in his court. We'll see what happens.
So, in non-professional terms, the social circle is expanding. As I mentioned above, I hosted Poker Night last night, and came out +$30, which will go towards gas for the drive. Had a good time, no neighbors complained (despite us going until about 3:30 AM), and it made for a fun way to end the teaching semester. Busy day, long day, but slept the sleep of the just.
Off to make soup and continue recovery from last night.
Alles Gute.
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