The Fall 2011 meeting of the Alabama Philosophical Society will be September 23-24 in Pensacola, Florida. (Why Florida? See last year’s hint.)
My Auburn colleague Mike Watkins (author of the best book ever on the metaphysics of colour – see my remarks here) will be the keynote speaker.
Papers can be submitted either to the regular program or to the undergraduate essay contest. Submission deadline: 7/22; hotel reservation deadline: 8/30. More details on the website.
The Molinari Society
Call for Papers
for the Society’s Symposium to be held in conjunction with the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division meeting December 27-30, 2011, Washington, D.C.
Symposium Topic:
Explorations in Philosophical Anarchy
Submission Deadline:
May 18, 2011
The past two decades have seen a resurgence of interest, both in activist and academic circles, in Anarchist politics and theory, with new and challenging work from several different directions. Renewed academic interest in Anarchism has drawn attention to the importance, vitality and philosophical fruitfulness of key Anarchist arguments and concepts – such as the conflict between authority and autonomy; tensions between collectivism and individualism; critical challenges to hierarchy, centralized power, top-down control and authoritarian conceptions of representation; and the development of concepts of spontaneous social order, decentralized consensus, and the knowledge problems and ideological mythologzing inherent in relations or structures of domination.
Most of this discussion has, naturally enough, taken place within the field of political and moral philosophy. But Anarchist theory (like marxist or feminist theory) embodies more than a policy orientation or a system of moral or political theses. The Anarchist tradition offers a wide-ranging, diverse and vigorously argued literature, concerning the nature and foundations of human society, with implications for every aspect of philosophy, including not only political and moral theory but also aesthetics, social-science methodology, epistemology, and the philosophies of science, religion, history, language and logic. We are looking for papers that address possible connections, approaches, challenges or insights that anarchy and its conceptual environs may suggest for philosophy broadly – or that philosophy may suggest for anarchy – beyond the familiar territory of political and moral theory, especially in such areas as epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of logic, and metaphilosophy or philosophical method. Papers from all analytical and critical standpoints (both with regard to philosophy and with regard to Anarchism) are welcome.
Please submit complete papers of 3,000-6,000 words for consideration for the 2011 Symposium by May 18, 2011. Papers should be of appropriate scope and length to be presented within 15-30 minutes. Submitting authors will be notified of the acceptance or rejection of their papers by May 31, 2011.
Submit papers as e-mail attachments, in Word .doc format or PDF, to longrob@auburn.edu or feedback@radgeek.com.
For any questions or information, contact us at the above email addresses.
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You can download a PDF of the Call For Papers to print and post on a bulletin board near you.
Some possible topics include – but are by no means limited to:
Please spread the word to anyone who you think would be interested in the symposium topic!
The purge mentality at ARI appears to be alive and well; and it seems that the doctrine of Rand’s inerrancy in matters of philosophy has been extended to include an assertion of Peikoff’s inerrancy in matters of history of science. More info here, here, and here.
David Kelley said everything that needed to be said about this sort of crap back in 1990.
Pensacola Gulf Front Hotel
The schedule for next month’s Alabama Philosophical Society in Pensacola (which looks to be our biggest yet) is now online. Abstracts will be added later.
Auburn University
(I had planned to present a paper on the extent to which the Problem of Good, i.e. of reconciling the existence of goodness with the universe’s having been created by an all-powerful malevolent being, is symmetrical with the traditional Problem of Evil, but then I discovered that more work had been done in this area than I’d realised, and that what I had to add wasn’t sufficiently original, so at the last minute I recycled my piece on Godwin instead.)
Also online is a pair of talks that Kelly Jolley and I gave back in 2002 at an Auburn Philosophical Society roundtable on the subject of The Idea of the University.
Ludwig Boltzmann
Three more blasts from the past (all a bit more recent than my blast from Oscarville):
First, two papers I wrote for a science course in college: “The Temptation of Ludwig Boltzmann” (a short sf story exploring the implications of Boltzmannian probability theory – though Amazon thinks it’s something else) and “Evolution: Chance or Teleology?” (an essay on the spontaneous growth of physical order).
Next, a blast from my statist past: “Financing the Non-Coercive State,” an essay I wrote in (though not for) grad school, in which I decisively refute free-market anarchism!
Derek McDougall has posted a review of Kelly’s Wittgenstein anthology whereof I’ve previously blogged.
McDougall seems to like my own contribution to the anthology: he calls it “arguably the finest paper in the book … revealing full command of its material and exhibiting a sureness of approach that captures a distinctly Wittgensteinian point of view,” and says that it “manages to say more on this subject in 11 pages than some writers have achieved by allowing themselves the length of a short monograph.” So I self-indulgently link to his review. 🙂