flowers and birds
Shen Nanpin (Shen Quan) (Chinese, 1682–1758)
250: week of February 8
Are animals persons?
Thanks to the treehugger blog for the charming photograph. Treehugger’s linked essay is about the Spanish parliament’s decision to extend human rights to great apes. This can’t be good news for the bull-fighting business, though bulls aren’t people in the meaning of the Spanish act.
Pmail is welcome as usual, and the blackboard notes should be here by Monday noon. Pmailers this week paid illuminating attention to the Cahn articles about psychological egoism and happiness, among other things.
This week’s reading is listed on the syllabus.
Last week two social-contract theories were scouted, Rawls’s and Gauthier’s. This week the magnifying glass will focus on what Singer is saying about personhood and personal identity in Chapters 4 and 5.
250: week of February 1
This image is from Patrick Farley’s “The webcomics examiner“. Scroll down to read “The Jain’s death” (1998). See also pmail this week about drawing the line between sentient and non-sentient life.
Please see the syllabus for this week’s reading assignment. The syllabus also now has more information about how to submit the midterm examination.
Notes for in-class discussion and/or your perusal can be found here.
250: week of January 25th
Please see the syllabus for this week’s reading assignment. Notes for discussion can be found here.
Please note that the syllabus now has more information about how to submit the midterm examination.
Please send me mail (subject line: pmail) by Thursday midnight, so that I can look at it over the weekend. If you’re late, that’s okay too. Also send pmail to your Friday instructor, if he or she has expressed the wish that you should do so.
250: week of January 18
Plato and Aristotle
Please see the syllabus for this week’s reading assignment. Notes for discussion can be found here.
Please send me mail (subject line: pmail) by Thursday midnight, so that I can look at them over the weekend. Also send pmail to your Friday instructor, if he or she has expressed the wish that you should do so.
We will break out into discussion groups for a short period on Wednesday, as we did on Monday. Here are some suggested focuses that relate to this week’s reading:
- Is there any hope of justifying Singer’s appeal to the Golden Rule, or must it have the status of an axiom?
- Do you share Regan’s confidence that moral reasoning is possible, or has modernity emptied moral discourse of the signification it had in antiquity? Do we live in `the age of emotivism’, pretending to give moral reasons when really we are just expressing our preferences?
- If God is dead, do we need to resurrect Him in order to salvage moral discourse? Are there any compelling reasons to believe that He exists?
- Continue Reading »
250: week of January 11
Socrates
Here are some notes to provide a basis for in-class discussion this week. If you have comments or questions about the readings, this post would be a good place for them. You might enjoy the web site Utilitarian Philosophers. You can find Bentham’s essay on homosexuality by clicking the “Jeremy Bentham” button. Look for the article on “Paederasty”.
Women in art
"Untitled" 1960 (Joseph Solman, 1909 - 2008)
(This piece can be purchased at Keith Sheridan Inc.)
Micheline Lehmann sent me this remarkable piece of digital art, “Women in art“, by Philip Scott Johnston (2007). You might like it, or, if not, tant pis.
250: The 1st assignment
"the death of Socrates", Jacques-Louis David (1801)
For next Friday (January 15th), please read pages 1 to 16 in Singer, and the Frankena essay in Cahn, “Morality and Moral Philosophy”, and also Cahn 2, Plato’s dialogue “Crito”. You could also take a look at the Wikipedia articles on Singer and Socrates, especially if you don’t have the texts yet. Please write a “participation email” to me at 123drc@gmail.com, with two parts: The first or upper part should be a question or a point about the reading, and the second or bottom part should be a remark about how the term is unfolding. The word count should be from 25 to 200 words, no more. If you could label the subject as “pmail”, that would help me filter the assignments into a separate box in my email account. You should send this by Thursday midnight.
Here is an example:
To: 123drc@gmail.com
Subject: pmail
5t12: What does that mean?
7b3: I disagree. Homer Simpson is not the greatest moral thinker who ever lived.
———-
Could you speak more loudly or use the microphone? I sit in the back and I can hardly hear you.
I missed Monday’s class because my car wouldn’t start.
Your Friday instructor may or may not want you to send a copy to him or her as well. That is up to him or her.
Des hommes pareils
Eugène Delacroix, “La Liberté guidant le peuple” (1830)
“J’avais rêvé une république que tout le monde eût adorée. Je n’ai pu croire que les hommes fussent si féroces et si injustes.” (Camille Desmoulins, writing to his wife from prison)
I read yet another feature article in the local newspaper about losing to the terrorists because they are making effective use of the Internet and we are not, etc. There is so much myopia in articles like this. The right focus is longsight, it seems to me:
Les gens absents
My sister-in-law, who is an avid and discerning reader, gave us her copy of Cormac McCarthy’s novel of the apocalypse, The Road (2006), and recommended it highly. I read it on the flight home, filling my head with nightmares different from but not unrelated to those of being blown out of the sky by an enthusiast for jihad.