Speaking of temporal...

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Another Productive Collegiate Network Conference

This past weekend, Tricia Steele and I traveled to Charlotte, NC to take part in yet another Collegiate Network conference. This is the organization that has given the journal a generous printing grant. At this particular event, students from all over the South met to share their experiences concerning the production of independent college publications. The weekend conference consisted of several workshops ranging from "Business Management" to "Ethics." Many tutorials not only offered indispensable advice, but outlined practical ways in which to accomplish the professional goal of publishing independently. To help students visualize this and the potential long-term success that might come about in the discipline of letters, several notable journalistic professionals were enlisted to speak to the student body.

One notable impression was made by Anne Carson Daly who is the Vice President for Academic Affairs from Belmont Abbey College and was a former Director of Policy Communications for Pfizer. Her speech, "What Does it Mean? Why Words Matter," particularly resonated with the philosophically-inclined students in the audience--those who are always eager to engage in discussions regarding the nature of language.

The underlying sentiment of her talk revolved around the activity of language, the concrete meaning that words hold, and the responsibility bestowed upon those who take on the role of distributing knowledge and information. Daly holds that those who choose to do so have a duty to be as transparent as possible as well as being responsible for the ignition of intellectual curiosity.

Working from the Platonic model of the Forms, Daly called her young audience to action: words have meaning behind them that ought to be acknowledged and protected. For her, language is not arbitrary, but vital and rich with meaning. Words point to the best of things and it is with this understanding that we create substance out of this world. As conductors of language we should embrace this role and view our duty as something sacred.

The future of Arete rests upon such philosophical vigor. It is our intention to express the temporal through a philosophical lens. We want people to understand the philosophical workings and implications of all things, no matter how minute they may originally appear. Such a lens gives individuals the tools to work past the immediate trappings of circumstance toward the greater things in life that hold ultimate value. Those are the things that we desire to express and protect. We hope that our ideas are infectious, controversial, and compelling. This aim, coincidentally, could not be possible without the basic understanding of how one word's meaning holds the potential to shape an idea, a movement, a mind, or a soul.

What would Pascal say now?

An Irish bookmaker is currently running odds of 4 to 1 that God exists.

What to Read During a Deep Recession

As the economic crisis grows, an article in the New York Times discusses the role of trading in derivatives, those complex financial contracts whose values derive from other transactions, in the current mess. The article blames Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, and his resistance to government regulation of derivative contracts for much of the economic crisis.

While Greenspan was a cheerleader for derivatives, Warren Buffett predicted five years ago that derivatives, which he called "financial weapons of mass destruction," carry dangers that are "potentially lethal."

It is no secret that Greenspan was a friend of Ayn Rand and that he remains an admirer of her "objectivist philosophy." Buffett, by contrast, reads the works of the philosopher Bertrand Russell for fun. Since books no doubt affect one's judgment, I think I'll take Atlas Shrugged off my reading list and spend some time with Russell's Human Knowledge or maybe Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy instead.

ADDENDUM: I should also note that George Soros, another of the foes of derivatives, studied under the philosopher of science Karl Popper at the London School of Economics. I'm noticing a pattern here.

Socrates' Jail Cell

Yesterday (September 22) the Philosophy Club had a very interesting and lively discussion of Plato's Crito. The Crito is concerned with the question of political obligation and takes place in the prison cell where Socrates awaits execution. Here's a picture of what purports to be Socrates' prison in Athens taken during my visit last summer.

Philosophy in the News

This article on the growth of interest in philosophy at Auburn University appeared in the New York Times Sunday magazine.

Philosophy is New Hot Major

Or at least that's what the New York Times reports. Read about it here.

New Officers for Philosophy & Religion Club

On April 3, four students were elected as the club's officers for 2008-2009. They are:

President: Abbi Butcher
Vice President: Zach Sherwin
Secretary: Will Harper
Tresurer: Tricia Steele

Congratulations to the new officers and to all the nominees for their willingness to serve.

We also would like to thank our outgoing officers who led the club this year and helped to make the spring semester especially successful and active. Most of the current officers will be graduating this semester, so we also wish them well in the future.

The club plans to have one more meeting this semester--a cookout. Date and time TBA.

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.

First Philosophy Club Meeting of the Semester

We will meet on Wednesday evening February 20 at 7:00 in Evans 122. The topic is love and eros. All are welcome.

The Rabbi, the Pope, and C.S. Lewis

No, this is not a joke! I recently finished reading Pope Benedict XVI's book Jesus of Nazareth. It is an excellent book and I recommend it highly. The most fascinating part for me was the pope's discussion of a book by Rabbi Jacob Neusner, A Rabbi Talks with Jesus. In that book Neusner seeks to explain why, if he had lived in Israel in the time of Jesus, he would not have been one of Jesus' followers. Neusner argues that Jesus is not just another rabbi attempting to reform Judaism and reinterpret the Torah, but is rather rejecting the Torah and its commandments, and attempting to take its place as the center of the Jewish faith. As a Jew loyal to the Torah, Neusner cannot accept Jesus or anyone else who seeks to replace the Torah. Still, Neusner is respectful toward Jesus and even says that he honors him and wishes him well.

Clearly, Benedict was impressed by Neusner's openness to rational engagement with and respect for Jesus. The pope makes the point that Neusner has understood that the Gospel of Matthew (on which Neusner bases his portrayal of Jesus) identifies Jesus with God, and it is only because Jesus saw himself as God that he can make the claims he does about Jewish law. In Benedict's view, Neusner has seen what many modern New Testament scholars and Christian theologians do not see--that interpreting Jesus as a liberal rabbi continuous with the tradition of Judaism rather than a disruption is untenable and even insulting to Jews who reject Jesus.

After reading the pope's book (I don't have Neusner's book yet but will order it soon) I read an interesting critique of Neusner by Rabbi Meir Soloveichik in the January 2008 issue of First Things. Soloveichik faults Neusner for his claim to honor Jesus and wish him well. According to Soloveichik, since Neusner acknowledges that Jesus claimed to be God, he cannot escape C.S. Lewis' famous trilemma from Mere Christianity: a man claiming to be the Son of God must either be the Son of God or a lunatic or the devil. Having rejected the first option, Neusner is stuck honoring and befriending either a madman or Satan, an absurd stance.

But is that right? I must confess (this might be considered heresy around here) I've never been convinced by Lewis' argument. Why is it absurd to respect someone who claims to be divine? Most of the pagan Roman emperors claimed divinity and were worshipped. Many of them, to be sure, were lunatics. But I still admire and respect Marcus Aurelius, who for all his many faults was a serious philosopher with many interesting things to say. If that's acceptable, why can't Neusner or any one else who denies the divinity of Christ nevertheless respect and honor him? So I'm with Neusner and Benedict on this point rather than Soloveichik and Lewis.

A final point: this intellectual encounter between Neusner, Benedict, and Soloveichik is the best interfaith dialogue I have found. Such dialogue tends usually to be burdened by a preordained relativism that prevents genuine debate. Happily that was not the case here.

I'm Back!

Some of you knew that I was on sabbatical last semester. One of the things that I have to do now that my sabbatical is over is to write a report of what I accomplished. But since Berry College was amazingly generous in giving me time off at full pay for about eight months, I think that it's not enough just to file a report to the administration. I should also let Berry students know what I did, since their tuition money paid for a good deal of my sabbatical.

I did three things during the semester. One of them, my trip to Greece, was the topic of a previous post. It was a great experience, one from which I learned a lot and which I look forward to doing again soon (maybe with some Berry students!)

The other two activities were:

1. Working on a book on Stoic logic. This has become my scholarly obsession the last few years and I needed the time off to make the progress that the book demanded. The ancient Stoics had a highly sophisticated system of logic, one which anticipated in many respects modern symbolic logic. Unfortunately very little of their writings survive, so people like me have to piece together and reconstruct their beliefs from the remaining fragments. My method was to start with those fragments and then to use the tools of modern logic to see what kind of logical system the Stoics would have produced if they were living today and knew of all the advances in logic since the nineteenth century. I made some interesting discoveries, in particular, that the Stoic system of modal logic (the logic of necessity and possibility) is in certain very interesting ways very different from standard modern modal logics. The details are a bit too complex to discuss here but I will be glad to talk about them to anyone who is interested (or you can just wait for the book to come out!).

2. I attended a class for the first time since grad school! I had the great privilege of being a part of Dr. Ron Taylor's Real Analysis class. It was such a pleasure to be a student instead of a professor for a change. And I learned so much not only about mathematics (one of my long-standing passions) but also about teaching. I got many ideas about good teaching from watching Ron, and I am grateful both to him and to my fellow students for putting up with me for the semester. If I had the time, I'd be taking another class this semester too.