« March 2005 | Main | May 2005 »

April 26, 2005

No Difference without a Difference Maker

is the title of Achille C. Varzi's paper which he will deliver to us on Friday, April 29. Prof. Varzi's visit is sponsored by S.U.'s Graduate Student Organization and is made possible by Judy's hard work as the External Speakers Committee (which is not a committee.)

The talk will begin at 4 pm in Killian Room, 500 Hall of Languages. Area philosophers or parts thereof are welcome to attend.

Following is the abstract.

I focus on three mereological principles: the Extensionality of Parthood (EP), the Uniqueness of Composition (UC), and the Extensionality of Composition (EC). These principles are not equivalent. Nonetheless, they are closely related (and often equated) as they all reflect the basic nominalistic dictum, no difference without a difference maker. And each one of them--individually
or collectively--has been challenged on philosophical grounds. In the first part I argue that such challenges do not quite threaten EP insofar as they are either self-defeating or unsupported. In the second part I argue that they hardly undermine the tenability of UC and EC as well.

Posted by ikurtsal at 11:06 AM | Comments (2)

April 15, 2005

S.U. Changing the Past

Today's Daily Orange has this headline:

SU hopes to alter past vs. Rutgers

I thought for a moment that Dean Newton had commissioned the physics department to invent a time machine to prevent John Hawthorne, Ted Sider, and Dean Zimmerman from going to Rutgers. Alas, it was just a lacrosse article, and it doesn't even involve changing the past, just having a future that's not like the recent past in one important respect. I knew the D.O. to be an awful paper, but I didn't know their headlines were so bad that they might mistakenly refer to an ordinary occurrence as a metaphysically problematic concept.

Posted by Jeremy at 1:21 AM | Comments (1)

April 13, 2005

moralhealth.com

For those who haven't noticed, a member of our faculty now has a personal blog. Laurence Thomas is now blogging at moralhealth.com.

Posted by Jeremy at 2:35 PM

Philosophers' Carnival XII

The 12th Philosophers' Carnival is at Inessentials. The PEA Soup cross-posting of Ben's Paradoxes of Desire Satisfaction and Hedonism is part of it, though it doesn't link to the posting of it here. Oh, well. I suppose that's the one with all the comments, though.

Posted by Jeremy at 2:23 PM

April 7, 2005

New Bennett Translations

For those following Jonathan Bennett's translations of early modern texts, he's added more works. Here's his description of the newest material:

In March I added Mill's On Liberty and Leibniz�s Making the Case for God, a 20-page Latin work originally published as an appendix to the French Theodicy with a long title starting Causa Dei Asserta. This was meant as a more rigorous version of the over-all argument of the longer but more informal work, and is not included in any of the Leibniz English-language anthologies currently in print.

I have now (late March 2005) barely begun work on Kant's Foundation of the Metaphysics of Morals.

I've never even heard of this Leibniz work. I'm intrigued. I know Bennett thinks the Theodicy is pretty shoddy, so if he thinks this is more rigorous then that's probably a good sign. It's also shorter and possibly of more use in a course that isn't just about Leibniz than the longer book, which Nicholas Jolley says is just too rambling to be of much use in a course setting. This would seem to solve both problems.

Of course, the Mill and Kant pieces are nice additions as well, but I'm a real Leibniz fan, so I had to take particular delight in that.

Posted by Jeremy at 2:05 PM

April 6, 2005

Medieval Teaching Resources?

I'm going to be teaching an ancient and medieval course for the first time this summer. I think I'll be fine on the ancient stuff. I'm planning to use Julia Annas' anthology that organizes readings by topics. I'm required to cover Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, and Descartes(!), but I'd like to focus a good deal on the Hellenistics and Augustine as well, and I hope to do a bit on the pre-Socratics as well. I think I'm good on the ancients and ok on Augustine, as long as I can find my notes from the Hellenistic seminar Bonnie Kent did in her one graduate course in her one year at Syracuse (she spent the last two weeks on City of God). What I don't have much of a sense with is what to do with the medievals beyond Augustine or how to integrate him with the others (besides the Hellenistics, which I could do passably). Does anyone know of any good resources for teaching medieval philosophy, preferably online? Does anyone have any ideas as to how to integrate the later people with the earlier ones? Annas' book organizes topically, and I'd prefer to do the whole course that way and not just for the ancient portion and then by philosopher from then on. I refuse to do the theory of forms or problem of universals in an introductory course, and much of what people talk about is related to that. Any ideas? I'm also interested in any insight into particular sections of Augustine or Aquinas that would tie in with the other philosophers I'll be dealing with, so if anyone knows of a convenient list of those I'd appreciate it.

Posted by Jeremy at 8:16 PM

Philosophers' Carnival XII Plug

The 12th Philosophers' Carnival is coming up next week. Here's the submission page. The host will be Inessentialism.

Posted by Jeremy at 8:06 PM