Politics of Science and Science of Politics

Berry's 11th Annual Conference on Politics, Religion, Culture and Community begins this Wednesday March 26 and continues to the next day. Details are available here.

Of particular interest, the Wednesday session at 3:30 in the Science Auditorium features Berry philosophy and honors students speaking on science, technology, and the modern world.

Later that evening at 6:00pm also in the Science Auditorium, Professor Patrick Deneen of Georgetown will speak on Virtue, Technology, and Wendell Berry.

All sessions are cultural events.

philosophy and hedge fund management

We've all heard the jokes about philosophy majors working at McDonald's. But in reality people who study philosophy in college usually have the last laugh. This story about the value of majors provides the details. In addition to pointing out that Stephen Colbert was a philosophy major, the article notes that Ryan Miller attributes part of his success in designing software for a hedge fund to his undergraduate study of Russell, Frege, and Wittgenstein (the holy trinity of analytic philosophy, the form of philosophy that relies heavily on symbolic logic and highly abstract reasoning). Miller says that studying analytic philosophy is a lot like hedge fund management (except for the money).

So maybe that's what went wrong at Bear Stearns. If they had spent more time reading the Tractatus or Principia Mathematica, things may have turned out better for them.

Second Philosophy Club Meeting of the Semester

Our next meeting will be Wednesday March 12 at 7:00 in Evans 122. The topic is the philosophy of education. Also, we will have elections of new officers: president, vice-president, tresurer, and representative to SGA.