In the past four days, three people have found their way to this blog by googling “Auburn sucks.” So to those of you who were looking for something about Auburn’s suckitude, you’re in the wrong place. But welcome!
[UPDATE: Someone got here today by googling "Hitler UGA".]
First and foremost, I don’t pretend to have anything particularly helpful or enlightening to share about the application process. I only write this out of a desire to (a) perhaps stir up a little optimism among any readers who are putting together their applications and wondering what the hell they should be doing and whether or not it’s really worth it and (b) offer what little advice I have to offer.
Second, I want to make it clear how sincerely I believe that mine is a very rare sort of case. While I do think that I did everything as well as I could, I still can’t help but consider myself extremely lucky to have ended up at UNC. Extremely lucky. So don’t let my story get your hopes up too much.
That said, what’s left of this post will come in two parts: I’ll first briefly tell my story and then I’ll end with some words of advice that you may not hear from other people (or maybe you’ve heard it all before, whatever).
I don’t have a B.A. in philosophy from a well-known college. In fact, I don’t even have a B.A. in philosophy. And the bachelor’s degree that I do have — one with a dual major in Biblical Studies and the Humanities — I got from a place that almost nobody has ever heard of: Atlanta Christian College. ACC has only one professor of philosophy. Lucky for me, he was an amazing teacher (when he wasn’t skipping his own classes to gallivant off to Florida for some surfing, that is).
The administrative higher-ups at ACC respected him enough to allow him to teach pretty much whatever he wanted to teach (in addition to the few classes he had to teach, that is). So he designed several seminar-style courses for myself and a few other students. We’d spend a couple hours each day sitting in his office, drinking coffee so strong I’d get teary-eyed every time I took a sip, and working our way through as much upper-level philosophy as we could get our hands on. And it was during our seminar on Moral Realism that I really think I “caught the philosophical bug,” as it were.
Now, when it came time to leave ACC, I was extremely naive about my chances of getting into grad school. The dreamer in me was under the impression that the names of institutions mean nothing, and that admissions committees judge all applicants primarily on the basis of their writing sample. And since I had what I thought was a pretty decent writing sample, I was rather confident about my chances. In retrospect, I really doubt that anyone actually even read my writing sample. I definitely should have applied to a wider range of programs (I think the lowest-ranked program to which I applied was Wisconsin), but I really doubt that that would’ve helped. In response to eight applications, I got eight rejection letters . . . and I got them all very quickly. My impression is that at least a couple of admissions committees saw “Atlanta Christian College” and didn’t even bother to read on. Of course, I don’t actually blame them; I mean, there’s got to be some sort of screening process when you’re weeding 200+ applications down to just a handful. But at the time, it kinda felt like I was being unfairly punished for not really being sure what I wanted to do with my life until my senior year of college.
Anyway, after I received my last rejection letter, I still had some time to apply to M.A. programs. So I applied to four — Western Michigan, Texas Tech, Loyola, and Georgia State — and got into three of them, eventually choosing Georgia State because (a) they were willing to out-bid the two other programs in terms of funding and (b) it allowed me to stay very close to family.
I did well at Georgia State. And now here I am at UNC, and I couldn’t be happier about it. (I actually still have the rejection letter that UNC sent me the first time I applied here.)
The moral of the story: If there are people out there getting from Atlanta Christian College to UNC, then there’s reason for you to be hopeful. (Well, maybe not hopeful, but certainly not hopeless. Again, I might have busted my ass to get here, but that doesn’t make it feel any less like winning the lottery.)
Okay, so here are a few things to think about when putting your applications together:
WRITING SAMPLE
If you get into grad school, it will be first-and-foremost because of your writing sample, so spend lots and lots and lots of time on it. Generally, the best idea is to use a paper that you’ve already written for one of your classes and either to beef it up a little or trim it down a bit (whatever it might need). Work with a professor or two to improve it. Your professors have a better idea than you do about what it’ll take to impress an admissions committee, so getting their input on your writing sample can be extremely helpful.
Also, for what it’s worth, I was told by my professors that interacting with both historical and recent literature in your writing sample is important. It gives admissions committees the impression that you’re a well-rounded researcher (which you should be), i.e., that you’re up-to-date on the very latest work in your areas of interest, but that you also make it a point to read it all through the lens of its historical context. For instance, I wrote on moral realism and supervenience, so I interacted with people from Moore, Ayer, and Mackie to even a few forthcoming articles. Also, writing on something like supervenience allowed me to draw parallels in other fields of philosophy (e.g., the philosophy of mind), another thing you might try to do.
LETTERS OF RECOMMENDATION
Be smart when choosing your recommendation letter writers. If there’s any reason to suspect that Professor So-and-so may not actually like you, then it might not be the best idea to ask Professor So-and-so to recommend your admission to other philosophers. Think about it: Your performance in grad school will reflect either negatively or positively on your letter writers. If you go off to grad school and make an ass of yourself, that raises questions about Professor So-and-so’s ability to discern between great students and asses. Your letter writers know this . . . and they don’t want to embarrass themselves.
Also, as much as your professors would love for you to be successful, and as much as they’re aware that writing recommendation letters is a part of their job, they’d be lying if they said that they enjoyed devoting precious hours of their life bragging to people they probably don’t even know about what a wonderful student they think you are. So do what you can to make their life a little easier. I put together a package for all of them with (a) a list of the schools to which I was applying (with the names of the people with whom I’d like to work), (b) the recommendation forms for those programs that require them, (c) envelopes (stamped and addressed, of course), and (d) copies of the papers I wrote for their classes. For those programs that asked recommenders to submit their letters online, I included an explanation of how exactly it was to be done. Everything was as clear and organized as I could make it.
STATEMENT OF PURPOSE
I know, I know. What the hell do you put in your statement of purpose? Here’s what I did:
Paragraph 1: Explanation of the sort of philosophical training I got at ACC (I figured that if I could give admissions committees a sense of the quality of training that I received as an undergrad, they might look past the fact that it was at a place called “Atlanta Christian College”).
Paragraph 2: The role Georgia State’s M.A. program played in making me a better philosopher (here I mentioned my GPA and a couple awards, but I tried to make it sound like I was just (a) confirming what I’d just said about ACC and not (b) just bragging about myself).
Paragraph 3: My research interests and what I’ve done to explore them while at Georgia State (here I mentioned three of the research papers I wrote while at Georgia State, the last of which happened to be my writing sample).
Paragraph 4: Why I’m applying to their program (here I mentioned how my research interests aligned with those of certain faculty members (yes, I named names) and politely complimented them on the overall quality of their program . . . without sounding like I was just kissing ass).
So for each of the many (too many) schools I applied to, paragraphs 1-3 were the same.
HANDLING THE WAITING
Honestly, this was the hardest part for me. I’d so much rather struggle over a writing sample than obsessively check my email every 5-10 minutes for two and a half months.
As hard as it might be, beginning at the end of January, do everything in your power to keep yourself distracted during the days. Treat yourself to lunch, go see an afternoon movie, pick up a hobby, go to that museum you’ve been meaning to visit, etc. And seriously, whatever you do, do not check the “who got in” and “gradcafe” bulletin boards online. I got sucked into that and it drove me crazy. There’s nothing like the feeling of reading that other people are getting into your dream program when you’re not hearing anything (except, of course, the feeling of reading that other people are getting into your dream program as you’re opening your rejection letter).
TERMINAL M.A. PROGRAMS
Because of my experience at Georgia State, I’ve really come to think that getting a terminal M.A. between one’s undergrad work and going on to the Ph.D. is a fantastic idea. It gives you two years to get even better at what you do. It exposes you to new philosophers, whose letters of recommendation might be taken a bit more seriously than those written by your undergraduate professors (after all, they can actually speak to your abilities to do graduate-level work in philosophy). And an M.A. from a respected program can make up for less-than-impressive undergraduate work.
Okay, that’s all I’ve got. And now that you’ve wasted your time reading this post, you should really read Eric Schwitzgebel’s series of posts on applying to Ph.D. programs (which he’s put together into one long entry and can now be found here). He tells you pretty much everything you need to know (and he’s even got experience being on an admissions committee).
There’ve also been a few interesting and potentially helpful discussions on the Leiter Reports blog, such as this one, this one, this one, and this one.
Good luck, people.
I take it that the folk are incompatibilists about determinism and both free will and moral responsibility (that is, they believe both free will and moral responsibility to be incompatible with determinism). But recent work in experimental philosophy suggests that I’m wrong about this. In this post, I want to take some initial steps toward a response to this recent experimental work by raising a concern or two about how it’s being carried out.
The method for probing the folk’s intuitions about the compatibility of determinism and either free will or moral responsibility (or both) has generally been the same across the board: Give the folk an imaginary scenario in which some agent is determined to perform some action and then ask them questions like (a) do you think the agent performed the action of her own free will? and (b) would it be fair to hold the agent responsible for performing the action? And as fate would have it (get it?), a majority of the folk answer that such determined agents do act of their own free will and that it would be fair to hold them responsible.
Here’s an example from a paper entitled “Is Incompatibilism Intuitive?” by Eddy Nahmias, Stephen Morris, Thomas Nadelhoffer, and Jason Turner. Consider the case of Jill:
Imagine there is a universe that is re-created over and over again, starting from the exact same initial conditions and with all the same laws of nature. In this universe the same conditions and the same laws of nature produce the exact same outcomes, so that every single time the universe is re-created, everything must happen the exact same way. For instance, in this universe a person named Jill decides to steal a necklace at a particular time, and every time the universe is re-created, Jill decides to steal the necklace at that time. (2006: 38)
Participants were asked both (a) “whether Jill decided to steal the necklace of her own free will” and (b) “whether ‘it would be fair to hold her morally responsible (that is, blame her) for her decision to steal the necklace.’” Of those asked, 66% answered that she acted freely and 77% answered that it would be fair to blame her for her action.
Here’s one worry of mine. In the paper mentioned above, Nahmias et al explain why they prefer not to actually use the word “determined” (or “determinism”) when describing the agents in their imaginary scenarios. The worry, they say, is that many people seem to have internalized the assumption that “determined” just means “having no free will.” And so, the very word “determined” might inappropriately prompt readers to answer that the agents did not act of their own free will.
Fair enough. But might there be other words that have this biasing power? I think so. As an incompatibilist myself, when I first read the case of Jill, I was thrown off a bit when I read that Jill “decides” to steal the necklace. And here’s why: Decision-making is a deliberative process, and it seems strange to me to suppose that determined agents can genuinely deliberate. Peter van Inwagen once wrote (and so it must be true),
In my view, if someone deliberates about whether to do A or to do B, it follows that his behavior manifests a belief that it is possible for him to do A — that he can do A, that he has it within his power to do A — and a belief that it is possible to do B. (1983: 155)
Tomis Kapitan echoes van Inwagen when he writes, “Integral to it [deliberation] is the agent’s sense of alternative possibilities, that is, of two or more courses of action he presumes are open for him to undertake or not” (1986: 230). But of course, if determinism is true, then the agent is mistaken in believing that there are alternative possibilities open for him to undertake or not.
If I were to tell you that Tom is a skydiver deliberating about whether or not to fall to the earth, you’d naturally assume that Tom must still be in the plane. Because again, we ordinarily understand “deliberating about whether or not to A” to mean that both A and not-A are actually on the deliberative table. That is, we naturally assume that in order for someone to be genuinely deliberating, there must (at least) be a “Door #2.” But if determinism is true, Tom might as well have already jumped out of the plane. But if Tom’s already falling to the earth (and cannot fly), then Tom might be doing something that feels to him like deliberation, but it’s not the same sort of thing that we ordinarily call deliberation — because again, Tom can do nothing but fall to the earth, so whatever it is that’s going on in his head bears only a superficial relation to his actual behavior. Similarly, Jill might have done something that felt to her like “deciding to steal a necklace,” but the option to do anything else was no more open for Jill as it is open for Tom to stop falling to the earth once he’s jumped.
Just like Nahmias et al (are probably right to) think that the word “determined” might inappropriately influence readers to judge that the agent being described is not acting of her own free will because of the readers’ (contestable) background assumptions about what it means to be “determined,” words like “decides” and “deliberation” might inappropriately influence readers to judge that the agent being described is acting of her own free will because of their background assumptions about what it means to “decide” or to “deliberate.” My hunch is that the folk are under the impression that anyone who is capable of decision-making must be acting freely, since the folk can only make sense of decision-making on the assumption that the agent is deciding between open alternatives. And so, it might be the case that no matter how determined-to-steal you make Jill sound, if you describe her action as the product of a genuinely deliberative process, the folk will have no problem calling her free (just like it might be the case that no matter how free you describe an agent, if you also use the word “determined,” the folk will have no problem denying that she’s free).
So I’m thinking about running some experiments in which these sorts of words — e.g., “decides,” “deliberates,” etc. — are removed and replaced with language that makes it all-the-more explicit that the agent’s action is determined (without, of course, using the word “determined”). If the results swing the other way, i.e., toward an incompatibilist interpretation of folk intuitions, then I think enough will have been done to cast some doubt on this recent experimental work that suggests we’ve been wrong about the folk all along. Or, at the very least, I think it will show that more armchair philosophizing needs to be done (for instance, about whether or not it’s fair to describe determined agents as “deciding to A”) before we go out and probe the folk.
REFERENCES
Tomis Kapitan, “Deliberation and the Presumption of Open Alternatives,” The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 36, No. 143, Special Issue: Mind, Causation, and Action (April 1986): 230-251.
Eddy Nahmias et al, “Is Incompatibilism Intuitive?” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 73, Issue 1 (July 2006): 28-53.
Peter van Inwagen, An Essay on Free Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983).
It seems crazy to me that it’s already time for people to start thinking about applying to Ph.D. programs, since it really feels like just a week-or-so ago that I was applying out, . . . but those of you who are beginning to put your applications together should read this.
Maybe I’ll post something in the near future about my experience.
UPDATE: This discussion might also be of some help.
Here are some crazy ideas I’ve been having.
So I’m taking a class on moral psychology and we’ve been reading papers that, in their own unique ways, address the relationship between the emotions and moral judgment-making (see, for instance, this one and this one).
The running theme (if it can be called that) is that our moral intuitions are at least often (some might say always) inspired by our emotions. And this is taken by many to be grounds for doubting whether or not those intuitions are trustworthy, in the sense that they actually are responding to moral facts out there in the world.
But nobody (so far, that is) has considered the thought that there might actually be a reason that we have the sorts of moral emotions we have, one that speaks in favor of their being trustworthy. (And here’s the part where I say something that might sound really crazy . . . ) For instance, why not suppose that moral emotions track moral truths?
First, it seems rather intuitive to me to say something like, “I get emotionally uneasy upon hearing that so-and-so has been abused because abuse is wrong,” or, “I am delighted when I read about Mother Theresa because she was such a good person.” Generally speaking, I feel good when I know I’ve done something good and I feel bad when I know I’ve done something bad. Now, someone might suggest that these emotions are really just evidence that my genes have tricked me into thinking that some things really are good while others really are bad, i.e., in order to get me to act in certain ways (here I’m thinking specifically of a paper written by Michael Ruse and E. O Wilson). And that’s fine. My point is only that there may also be some sort of truth-tracking story that the realist could tell about the moral emotions.
And second, it seems as if there’s a kind of normativity that we all think applies to the emotions, which is strange when I think about it. For instance, if I found out one day that my good friend was positively delighted at the sight of suffering children, my response would be something like, “What the hell is wrong with you?” Those who have been diagnosed with anti-social personality disorder lead much different emotional lives than the rest of us, . . . and this, we say, is characteristic of a disorder. Regardless of whether or not I do have certain moral emotions, it may still be the case that I ought to (or ought not to, in the case of my sadistic friend) have those emotions.
How can we account for this normativity? Well, I think there are (at least) two ways. One is to just claim that our biology has tricked us into believing in it as well. There really are no moral truths, but in order to get us to survive, our genes have had to convince us that there are; and one of the best ways for our genes to do such a thing is to (a) give us all sorts of (misleadingly) truth-indicative moral emotions and (b) make us think that other people ought to share those emotions.
But, of course, the realist isn’t going to find any of that compelling. So how might a moral realist account for the sort of normativity that we think applies even to the moral emotions? It just sounds so weird to say that people ought to have certain emotions, and ought not have certain other emotions. It sounds a bit like holding someone responsible for the sorts of dreams they have.
(And here’s the part where I say the other crazy-sounding thing . . . )
What about a proper function account of moral agency? Properly-functioning moral agents have reliably truth-tracking moral emotions. Improperly-functioning moral agents do not (e.g., those suffering from anti-social personality disorder).
There are probably all sorts of problems with this idea, but this is as far as my thoughts have gotten me so far. If anyone has actually taken the time to read this craziness and would like to offer some constructive thoughts, please feel free to leave comments. I’m sure there’ll be follow-up posts, . . . since this is looking more and more like a potential paper.
Welcome to the 48th Philosophers’ Carnival.
I suppose this’ll be the “School’s Out For Summer” edition of the Carnival (despite the fact that some of you are either teaching or taking summer courses). And so, in that spirit, I’d like to first direct your attention to Alice Cooper’s 1978 performance of “School’s Out” on the Muppet Show.
And now let’s get to the philosophy. As I noted earlier, I’ll be dividing selections into their respective branches of philosophy, and so only those submissions that very clearly belong to a(t least one) particular branch of philosophy made the cut.
METAPHYSICS
Jessica Leech of the “Bloggin the Question” blog discusses the copula modification approach to modal language. She concludes, “In order to give the copula modifier account of modality fair trial, we cannot follow McGinn’s lead. We must either find an alternative way to understand modal satisfaction, or find a better way to make sense of copula modification than in terms of modification of satisfaction.”
John Depoe of the “Fides Quaerens Intellectum” blog examines one of the premises of the Kalam cosmological argument for the existence of God, asking, “Why should we think that ‘whatever begins to exist must have a cause’ is true?”
And Bryan Norwood of the “Movement of Existence” blog notes four prominent theories of truth and various objections to each.
EPISTEMOLOGY
Avery Archer of “The Space of Reasons” blog begins with McDowell’s disjunctivism and adds a further distinction between weak and strong belief. Archer explains, “To strongly believe that p entails that a subject is intellectually/ rationally/ doxastically committed to p being true. To weakly believe that p entails that a subject is intellectually/ rationally/ doxastically committed to p being likely or highly probable.”
Amy Wuest of the Florida Student Philosophy Blog discusses the importance of virtues in epistemology. She begins with an account of what virtue epistemology is and proceeds to show how virtue epistemology both (a) “reconciles important epistemic problems” and (b) deals with a couple of interesting cases in particular.
Martin Cooke of the “Enigmania” blog explains how both Humean and Cartesian skepticism motivate us to take seriously what is common sense.
ETHICS
Alonzo Fyfe of the “Atheist Ethicist” blog takes a Euthyphro kind of approach to the claim that morality is ultimately a matter of genetics. He asks, “Is X morally good because it is loved by the genes? Or is X loved by the genes because it is morally good?” And according to Fyfe, “If the genetic moralist takes the first horn of this dilemma, she falls into a trap of saying that the most horrendous acts can be good. . . . If the genetic moralist takes the second option, then we are still missing an account of what ‘wrong’ is.”
Seth Baum of the “Felicifia” blog addresses the concept of infinite utility as a potential problem for utilitarian ethical theories. According to Baum, “Utilitarianism’s got a problem: It recommends maximizing total utility, but if there’s even the slightest chance that this total utility could be infinitely large, then the whole system breaks down.”
Brian Berkey of the “Philosophy from the Left Coast” blog examines and expands upon Elizabeth Ashford’s argument against Bernard Williams’ claim that utilitarianism is incompatible with agents’ integrity. Berkey concludes, “If there is a good argument for the view that there are limits to what morality can demand of individuals, it must appeal to considerations other than the effects of certain moral demands on agents’ existing self-conceptions.”
PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
Over at the “On Philosophy” blog, Peter asks us to “[i]magine that one day that basic components of the world were instantaneously replaced by other things, in a one-to-one correspondence, which had the same patterns of interactions (the same functional properties) as the things they replaced. Would we notice the change?” He’ll conclude that “if we accept that all properties are ultimately functional properties, consciousness, being some functional property of our biological brains, must ultimately be able to be found in non-biological systems of sufficient complexity as well.”
Justin of the “Panexperientialism” blog considers the argument of Graham Cairns-Smith in his book Evolving the Mind that consciousness would not have evolved if it did not have adaptive effects upon the physical and wonders how an epiphenomenalist might respond.
Quincy Faircloth of the Florida Student Philosophy Blog argues on Epicurean lines that we should not fear death. According to Faircloth, his materialistic view of the soul “leads Epicurus to his most profound argument for not fearing death. If the soul dies when the body dies there is no reason whatsoever to fear death, because we simply will not exist to experience it.”
PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE
Guest-blogging on Michael Horton’s “Nothing but the Truth-in-L” blog, Carl Ehrett first lays out four different ways of making the same objection to epistemicism (the idea that the vagueness of terms is an epistemic phenomenon) and then suggests that the objection is often made on the wrong grounds. He writes, “[T]his objection tends to be utilized by those who wish to hold that the meaning of ‘bald’ is not precisely bounded; but the objection cannot be so used, for the problem of the objection is generated not by holding that the meaning of ‘bald’ is precisely bounded, but rather merely by holding that ‘bald’ has a meaning at all, as I will attempt to show here.”
Nathan of the “Philosophy and Literature” blog explains why the deconstruction of speech acts “misses the point.” Specifically, such deconstruction “loses all linguistic intention, and in this regard speech acts invariably retain all linguistic intention when the ontological status on language is understood.”
And in a post that could just as easily be put in either the Epistemology or Philosophy of Religion section, Joseph Long of the Florida Student Philosophy Blog uses the causal theory of reference to criticize a central premise of Sam Harris’ Reasons for Belief argument Christianity, namely, the premise that states, “[I]f two people having all the same supporting belief-schema for their respective faiths and the faiths are inconsistent with each other, then neither has more reason than the other to believe her faith.”
PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
Many of you are probably familiar with the Free Will Defense as it serves to respond to the Problem of Evil. Richard Brown of the “Philosophy Sucks!” blog tries his hand at reviving one of Mackie’s arguments against the Free Will Defense by asking, “[W]hy it is that our being free requires that we be allowed to do evil?”
In the past couple of weeks, Alexander Pruss has posted two arguments for the existence of God on “The Prosblogion” blog. One has to do with the permissibility of unconditional love, the other with gratitude.
LEGAL and POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
Jeremy Pierce of the “Parableman” blog asks whether or not President Bush is his own president. (His discussion is an off-shoot of the one that started when Trent Dougherty asked, “Who is God’s God?“).
Thom Brooks of “The Brooks Blog” links to his latest work on Hegel’s legal philosophy. His suggestion is that “Hegel is a natural lawyer, although not of a more familiar variety.”
And Joseph Orosco of the “Engage: Conversations in Philosophy” blog suggests an alternative way to conceive of the justification behind diversity-aimed legislation.
DECISION THEORY
On the Big Ideas blog, Newcomb’s Paradox is first summarized and then reduced to a pair of sorites paradoxes.
There’s also an interesting new post up on the “Thoughts, Arguments, and Rants” blog about Newcomb’s Paradox, for those who are interested.
HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY
Ashok Karra of the blog “Rethink” submitted an interpretation of Plato’s Republic, 331d-336a. There are four parts, the first of which is here.
Ian Wasser of the Florida Student Philosophy Blog investigates the claim that Nietzsche is a reductionist with respect to humans being driven solely by the “will to power” like machines. This post is the second in a three-post discussion of Nietzsche’s conception of the “will to power.”
REVIEWS
David Gross reviews Arne Johan Vetlesen’s book Evil and Human Agency. Gross calls the book an attempt to “to reconcile sociological, psychological, and philosophical accounts of human evildoing, particularly those prompted by attempts to wrestle with the Holocaust and other examples of large-scale massacre: things like Hannah Arendt’s examinations of totalitarianism and ‘the banality of evil,’ and the Milgram experiment.”
COMICS
Thad Guy has a good one about free will.
Jonathan Ichikawa’s series on realism (parts one, two, and three) made me laugh.
And I also like this one, which I found over at On Philosophy.
~ ~ ~
It’s been a pleasure hosting the Philosophers’ Carnival. In closing, I’d like to encourage everyone to continue the many interesting discussions taking place over at the 2nd Annual Online Philosophy Conference. And if you’re interested in hosting a future Philosophers’ Carnival, you can find out how to do so here.
. . . is here. I encourage everyone to partake.
I’m in the background of the Ernest Sosa video. Whenever it cuts to the audience, I’m slouched down between two people’s shoulders wearing a navy blue hat with a gold “M” on it (I was born in Michigan; still a fan).
In an attempt to inspire me to post more stuff on this blog (and, of course, to showcase some fine online philosophizing), I’m hosting a Philosophers’ Carnival. The festivities will be on Monday, June 4th. If you’d like me to feature something you’ve written, please submit it via this online submission form.
I’m not really looking for anything in particular, although I am of the mindset that certain conceptions of “philosophy” are more interesting to students and teachers of philosophy than others. You might have written an exceptionally insightful haiku, for instance, but it won’t be featured here. I’ll probably be dividing submissions up according to the area of philosophy to which they most clearly belong, so you might keep this in mind when deciding what to submit.
The most recent Philosophers’ Carnival can be found here.
I just got a book in the mail today entitled PRO EVO and subtitled Pro Evolution — Guideline for an Age of Joy. It’s unclear who the author is (at the top of the front cover is the word “Tomotom,” and at the bottom of the front cover is the word “Asama”). It’s copyrighted to one “Tomotom Stiftung.”
It appears to be a new-agey kind of evolutionist-meets-Eastern-religious-thought sort of book. Browsing through the Table of Contents, I saw that it’s got a blurb on “Morality.” Here’s the blurb:
Morality is man’s conscious pro-evo behavior toward his own body, toward his fellow men, and toward animals, plants, and the natural environment.
And that’s that.
Anyone else received a copy of this book? And does anyone happen to know anything more about it?
