Philosophy Club
McCord Fancher '10, President of the Philosophy Club
Professor Bennett Helm, Club Advisor
For more information regarding the Philosophy Club, please contact: roderick.fancher@fandm.edu.
November 5th, 4:30 p.m., Bonchek Lecture Hall, LSP
David Hanson, "The Minimum Drinking Age of 21 is a Failure: What Can We Do About It?"
The minimum legal drinking age of 21 is a enormous social engineering experiment that is a failure and will inevitably continue to fail. Not only is it a civil rights issue -- treating adults age 18-20 as children -- but it promotes dangerous drinking behaviors that lead to to a massive unnecessary toll of tragic injuries and deaths. How long will we idly stand by and watch our generation victimized by the imposition of an entrenched temperance morality?
For more information, see Dr. Hanson's website here.
Movie Nights with Philosophy ClubLeibniz and Spinoza Conference (September 28-29, 2007)
First Club Meeting (September 21, 2007)
Lecture: On the Ontology of Music (September 6, 2007)
Movie Nights with Philosophy Club
November 6th--8:00pm
The Philosophy Club members will gather in the Philosophy Seminar room to watch Stranger than Fiction, a film featuring Will Ferrell. Afterwards, refreshments will be served, and light philosophical discourse will be offered for dessert.
December 4th--8:00pm
On this date, the Philosophy Club will be viewing V for Vandetta, at a location yet to be finalized. Afterwards, refreshments will be served, and light philosophical discourse will be offered for dessert.
Leibniz and Spinoza Conference (September 28-29, 2007)
Friday, Sept. 28 - Saturday, Sept. 29, 2007
We are running a field trip to a conference at Princeton Sept 28-29. The conference is an international gathering of scholars who work on Leibniz and Spinoza--a program is listed below. We would leave on the morning of Friday the 28th and return late on the 29th. Unfortunately, this is also Parent’s Weekend so it is a less than ideal time. If you are interested, we will cover the cost of transport and lodging (as long as the numbers are not too high!).
CONFERENCE PROGRAM: LEIBNIZ AND SPINOZA II
Princeton University
Sponsored by
Princeton University
Leibniz Society of North America
Ecole Normale Supérieure – Lettres et Sciences Humaines
Centre d’Etudes en Rhétorique, Philosophie et Histoire des Idées (UMR 5037)
This will be the second of two events in a Franco-American collaboration, organized by Daniel Garber (Princeton University), Pierre-François Moreau (ENS-LSH), Mark Kulstad (Rice University), and Mogens Laerke (University of Chicago). The first conference took place on March 15-17 at the Ecole Normale Supérieure Lettres et Sciences Humaines, Lyon.
The two conferences aim to put in place a truly international group working toward a common project. Organized around a well-defined philosophical and historiographical problem, these conferences aim to establish a forum for the comparison, confrontation, and coordination of divergent historiographical and philosophical national traditions, and thus to reinforce the relations between the scholarly communities in the U.S. and Europe.
The precise scholarly objective of these two conferences is to reevaluate the nature and the importance of the biographical, historical and philosophical relations between these two major figures in the history of philosophy.
PROGRAM
FRIDAY, 28 SEPTEMBER
1:15: Welcome
1:30-2:30 Steven Nadler (University of Wisconsin, Madison): Spinoza, Leibniz, and the Gods of the Philosophers
2:30-3:30 Brandon Look (University of Kentucky): Essence, Existence, and Expression: Leibniz on 'All the Absurdities of Spinoza's God'
Break
4:00-5:00 Christia Mercer (Columbia University): Spinoza and Leibniz on Being God
5:00-6:00 Vincent Carraud (Université de Caen): Per se concipitur. La causalité de la mens en 1676
6:00-7:00 Michael Della Rocca (Yale University): Violations of the Principle of Sufficient Reason in Leibniz and in Spinoza
7:15 Cocktail Reception
SATURDAY, 29 SEPTEMBER
9:00-10:00 Fabien Chareix (Université de Paris IV (Sorbonne)): When Bodies Swing : Leibniz and Spinoza on Huygens' Laws
10:00-11:00 Delphine Kolesnik-Antoine (Ecole Normale Supérieur, Lyon): Malebranche avec Spinoza, contre Leibniz? La question de la “force qu'a l'âme de mouvoir le corps”
Break
11:30-12:30 François Duchesneau (Université de Montréal): Force and the organization of bodies in Spinoza and Leibniz
Lunch
2:00-3:00 Martine de Gaudemar (University of Paris X (Nanterre)): La voix des possibles. Variations autour de la nécessité
3:00-4:00 Michael Griffin (Central European University, Budapest): Leibniz’s Necessitarianism
Break
4:30-5:30 Samuel Newlands (University of Notre Dame): Spinoza, Leibniz, and the Modalities of Perfection
5:30-7:00 Martin Lin (Rutgers University) and Robert Sleigh (University of Massachusetts, Amherst): Rationalism and Necessitarianism
SUNDAY, 30 SEPTEMBER
9:30-10:30 Mogens Laerke (University of Chicago): "Alloglosson, or ‘He who speaks another language’. Leibniz on Spinoza’s innovative use of philosophical language, and the case of extension"
10:30-11:30 Anne-Lise Rey (Université de Lille): La controverse entre C. Wolff et J. Lange: quelques précisions sur une "pseudo-philosophie" spinoziste
11:30-12:30 Jonathan Israel (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton): Spinoza's Relationship to Leibniz Reappraised: Lessing's Recasting of the German Radical Enlightenment (1753-81)
12:30-2:00 Lunch and round table discussion
The conference is free and open to the public. However, we request that attendees register beforehand with Lucretia Barton <lbarton@princeton.edu .>.
First Club Meeting (September 21, 2007)
Our first meeting of the Fall 2007 semester will be on Friday, September 21, 3:00-4:00 in the Philosophy Seminar Room (Life Sciences & Philosophy Building, Room 258).
Our reading for this semester is Paul A. Boghossian, Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006). We will be reading the first two chapters, pages 1-24, for our first session. You can find this reading in the Readings folder of this site. Subsequent readings for our sessions will also be posted there.
NEWS FLASH Professor Jack Heller, Marshall-Buchanan-Thomas Don, has volunteered MBT as a sponsor of the Epistemology Reading Group. So long as you notify me at gross@fandm.edu that you need the book and want to be added to the book order, then you may procure your complimentary copy of Boghossian's Fear of Knowledge, as soon as they arrive in the College Bookstore, just by identifying yourself as a member of our group at the front desk. I will notify you as soon as the books are available. If you have already paid for your copy, you may present your receipt to Professor Heller and he will reimburse you.
Lecture: On the Ontology of Music (September 6, 2007)
Ben Caplan, from the Ohio State University and our department’s first guest speaker of the year, gave an informal discussion on Thursday, September 6th entitled, “On the Ontology of Music.” Students and faculty alike broached a few metaphysical issues concerning the ontology of music, including questions over the existence of musical works, whether a song is a temporally extended entity that can be extended in time as well as a spatially-scattered entity (simultaneously playing the same song in two or more places). Additionally, students debated the existence of songs by either taking a discoverist approach, whose proponents claim that musicians do not literally bring a musical work into existence, but rather find or discover a song’s combination in the world vs. a creationist account, which maintains that artists are creative and therefore bring their songs into existence. The discussion was summed up with a question/answer session and, of course, music.
