What’s the role of philosophy in contemporary society?

Modes of Philosophizing: A Rountable Debate with Jonathan Barnes, Myles Fredric Burnyeat, Raymond Geuss, Barry Stroud

Should philosophy have something to say to non-philosophers? Should it be pursued only by those trained in philosophy? And how should analytic philosophy deal with other “modes of philosophizing”? “Cogito” poses some big questions to four prominent British and American philosophers. Click here to read the full essay.

Research Fellowship at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford

Research Fellow (Science and Religious Conflict Project)

FACULTY OF PHILOSOPHY
UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

Applications are invited for the post of Research Fellow (Science and Religious Conflict) within a research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The project is based in the Faculty of Philosophy, and will be directed by Professor Julian Savulescu, who also directs the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, the Programme on Ethics of the New Biosciences, and the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics. The AHRC project will relate closely to these, and starts on 1 January 2009, for three years.

The Research Fellow will conduct research which aims to understand the ways in which cognitive and affective biases and heuristics affect the reasoning, judgments, and ultimately the behaviour of people in states of moral disagreement, and the causal processes which thereby lead to conflict. A secondary aim is to use the case of religious disagreement as a model to draw lessons about the nature and the ethically acceptable management of interpersonal disagreements and conflicts.

The successful candidate will have outstanding analytical skills and the ability to rapidly comprehend new material from a variety of disciplines, including psychology and philosophy. As a key member of the research team (there will be two Research Fellows working on this project), the post-holder must be able to work in a multi-disciplinary team to ensure high-quality academic and policy outputs. AOS is ideally a background in or relevant to Philosophy or Psychology, or a related discipline. Knowledge or experience of Theology would be an advantage.

This position will offer the best candidate excellent career opportunities to work on a project that benefits from stimulating facilities for research and teaching, and the presence of Professor Julian Savulescu, an internationally renowned philosopher and ethicist.
The post will be made on the University’s grade 7 scale, up to Grade 07S.03 (£27,466 – £29,138), with increments in years two and three.

Further particulars, including how to apply, are available at: http://www.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/vacancies.htm or from miriam.wood@philosophy.ox.ac.uk.
The deadline for applications is Friday, 7 November 2008. Interviews are likely to be held in the week commencing 1 December 2008.

The University of Oxford is an equal opportunities employer.

“Literature, Art and Culture in an Age of Global Risk,” Cardiff University, July 2-3, 2009

What are the cultural implications of living under conditions of global, manufactured risk? In the twentieth century, the possibility arose for the first time that a crisis of planetary proportions might result from human activities. By the early decades of the century, global economic and financial interdependence was such that a crisis unfolding in one location could radiate outwards to destabilize the entire socio-economic world-system. Through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, the risk of pandemic upheaval has been heightened by an array of phenomena: the expansion and acceleration of media and telecommunications networks; the integration of financial markets and the instantaneous ramification of market fluctuations via programme trading; nuclear proliferation; international terrorism; rapid population growth; unsustainable consumption of natural resources; overload of electricity grids, leading to cascading power failures; pollution of the ecosphere and resulting climate change; computer viruses and ‘cyber-warfare’; genetic engineering; cloning; nanotechnology; artificial intelligence; bioweaponry; the emergence and rapid spread of new strains of infectious disease; and the development of antibiotic-resistant pathogens.

Scholars speak of ‘systemic risk’ (Anthony Giddens), ‘simultaneous crisis formation’ (David Harvey), a ‘general disaster’ (Brian Massumi), ‘worst imaginable accidents’ (Ulrich Beck), ‘total risk of catastrophe’ (François Ewald), ‘global’ or ‘integral’ ‘accidents (Paul Virilio), ‘global catastrophic risks’ (Nick Bostrom and Milan Cirkovic), and ‘modernist events’ – ‘events which not only could not possibly have occurred before the twentieth century but the nature, scope, and implications of which no prior age could even have imagined’ (Hayden White). Such occurrences hover indeterminably somewhere between the possible, the probable, and the inevitable. This conference will explore how writers, artists, filmmakers, dramatists, philosophers, and critical and cultural theorists have responded to the prospect and reality of global crisis. Moreover, it will ask how the methodologies of textual and cultural criticism might offer new insights into our age of global risk.

Keynote speakers:
Prof. Imre Szemán (McMaster University, Canada)
Dr Charlie Gere (Lancaster University, UK)

Topics might include, but are by no means limited to:
• Notions of futurity, messianism, and the à venir (‘to come’)
• Modernism and the first era of globalization
• Figurations of the contemporary, postmodern, or technological sublime
• The alteration and/or realization of textual meanings in the wake of catastrophic events
• Connections between conditions of global risk and the aesthetic or intellectual ‘risks’ taken by experimental artists and thinkers
• Disaster films
• Ecocriticism and climate change
• Future ruins
• The fate of the archive
• ‘Nuclear Criticism’ and its possible revival post-9/11
• (Post-)apocalyptic visions
• Cyberculture and utopian/dystopian futures
• The cultural implications of Kondratiev waves and world-systems theory

Please send 250-word abstracts for 20-minute papers to the organizer, Dr Paul Crosthwaite, at globalrisk@cardiff.ac.uk by Monday 22 December 2008. Proposals for three-person panels are also welcome; please send a brief description of the panel along with abstracts for the individual papers.

Visit the conference homepage here: http://www.cf.ac.uk/encap/globalrisk/

CFP: Recreate, Replace, Restore: Exploring the Intersections between Meanings and Environments

Call for Papers

Recreate, Replace, Restore: Exploring the Intersections between Meanings and Environments

A Conference at Ohio Northern University, 17-19 April 2009
Sponsored by: the ONU Working Group on Religion, Ethics, and Nature (through a grant from the Metanexus Institute)

The natural world has been “humanized”-even areas thought to be wilderness bear the marks of human impact. Given the long reach of human influence, environmental thought in the humanities and the sciences have sought to understand how we can limit, change, or reverse the more disastrous effects that humans have had on the environment. Preservation is not the sole or primary strategy; restoration, sustainable design, and other creative responses to place have become part of the debate. Further, both the sciences and the humanities have increasingly realized the interconnection between human accounts of meaning and the more-than-human world. Thus, reflections on the proper approaches to natural and built environments increasingly include investigations into contested religious, philosophical, and ethical meanings of the environments that surround us.

The aim of this conference is to further the ongoing dialogue on religion, ethics, and the environment by exploring three interrelated concepts: to recreate, to replace, and to restore. The interdisciplinary dialogue hosted by the conference is meant to illuminate certain unique dimensions at the crossroads between finding value and reflecting on one’s place in the world. Each of these terms has diverse religious, ethical, and scientific connotations. Each converges on the ways in which humans both think about and act upon their surroundings. And each radically questions the damaging conceptual divisions between nature and culture, human and environment, and scientific explanation and religious/ethical understanding. Papers, discussions and keynotes will reflect on how one or more of these terms illuminates the intersection between questions of meaning and the environments in which we find ourselves.

Recreate

“Re-creation” is multivalent and complex. At the heart of this word is a term with important theological meanings-”creation.” In turn, creation leads to a host of other associations: the concept of a divine creator, the power of creativity, homo faber, and the cosmic creation myths. In an ecological context, to recreate can suggest innovative, novel approaches to scientific phenomena, both in theoretical and applied ecology. These, in turn, allow us to better understand the diversity of ecological processes and the role humans play within. But recreation in these cases also quickly leads to religious narratives of destruction and annihilation. A creator must “wipe the slate clean” in order to recreate. Scientists must challenge and question existing technologies, models and paradigms to innovate.

Replace

Regarding the term “replace”, this might refer to adding new knowledge into our pedagogies and practices. In the sciences, the more we understand, the more important it is for biologists to incorporate this knowledge into practice. But the term also highlights the spatial dimensions of nature as seen by its etymological rootedness in “place.” The OED tells us that “to replace” returns us to an earlier place, or take the place of something else. For philosophical and religious thought on nature, this might mean to return to earlier settings and places, or to overcome the ways in which we dwell in place. Further, to replace evokes issues of sustainability and consumption in light of current economic debates and practices.

Restore

At the intersection of the humanities and the sciences, the concept of “restoration” holds a diversity of meanings. For example, for ecology and policy studies, “to restore” evokes our need to implement scientific knowledge in restoring areas to self-sustainable, diverse landscapes, communities, and ecosystems. To restore a place or landscape includes a desire to minimize our “footprint” upon the Earth. But restoration also means that we must understand the history and temporality of nature, for it conjures up thoughts of returning to a primeval or primitive state. Paralleling such philosophical and scientific questions, some of the connotations of restoration highlight cosmic meaning and anthropology. The ideal of many religions is to restore nature and the human to some ideal state, such as a union with God, an original perfection, or a pre-existent cosmic order.

Paper Proposals

To further explore these issues, conference organizers seek papers in the humanities, social sciences and the ecological sciences on the conference theme of “Recreate, Replace, Restore: Exploring the Intersections between Meanings and Environments.”
Individual papers should be approximately 20-minutes reading time. We strongly encourage submissions from diverse scientific, religious, and philosophical approaches. Possible themes include (though are not limited to):

• The philosophical, ethical, religious or spiritual dimensions of restoration in all its aspects
• Scientific assessments of restoration, the reintroduction of species, or the preservation of locales
• Built environments, nature, and the meaning of place
• Theological and philosophical reflections on human alterations of environments
• Architecture and green building as recreating places
• Ways of interpreting and/or responding to the meaning of individual places (including through literature, art, and other humanities)
• Interpretations or critical assessments of the conference concepts (“Recreate, replace, restore”)
• Identification of areas of ecology that are unrepresented in discussions of creation or creativity
• Other treatments related to “recreate, replace, restore”

Poster Proposals

Also, we encourage poster proposals from scientists, scholars and practitioners who are interested in contributing scientifically-oriented posters in general ecology, conservation ecology and restoration ecology for an interdisciplinary audience. Abstracts for posters should provide a brief introduction of the study, the major methods used and results gathered, then a discussion of the practical application of the research to the conference’s theme of “Recreate, Replace, Restore: Exploring the Intersections between Meanings and Environments.” Posters should be landscape-oriented and sized 3 feet by 4 feet (1.2 meters by 0.9 meters) or smaller. Possible themes for posters include (though are not limited to) theoretical and applied topics in:

• General population, community, landscape, & ecosystem ecology.
• Conservation ecology and assessment
• Restoration ecology and assessment
• Resource management
• Ecological impact of urbanization & urban design
• Ecological impact of invasive species
• Nature preserve design and management

Paper proposals should be sent to the conference organizers Mark Dixon (m-dixon@onu.edu) or Forrest Clingerman (f-clingerman@onu.edu). Poster proposals should be send to conference organizer Jay Mager (j-mager@onu.edu). All proposals should include name, contact information, and 3-5 keywords, in addition to a 300-500 word abstract. Deadline for proposals is 31 October 2008. Acceptance notifications will be sent out by 15 December. Accepted papers will be considered for inclusion in a possible edited volume on the conference theme. More information will be made available online at www.onu.edu/org/wgren.