Tag Archives: announcements

CFP: The Ethics of Bodily Commodification

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James Stacey Taylor of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at The College of New Jersey has asked me to post this CFP on what turns out to be a  rather timely topic.

CALL FOR PAPERS
“The Ethics of Bodily Commodification”
Saturday, April 2nd, 2016

Keynote Speakers:
Mark J. Cherry, St Edwards University
Samuel J. Kerstein, University of Maryland

To be held at The College of New Jersey, Ewing, NJ

The College of New Jersey’s attractive Georgian campus is located just a few miles from Princeton, and is easily accessible by public transport (just over an hour’s travel time) from both central Philadelphia and central New York.

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Revised CFP: Tenth Annual Conference of the Felician Institute for Ethics and Public Affairs

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I’ve revised the CFP for the Felician ethics conference to reflect the title of J.L.A. Garcia’s plenary talk, “Grounding the Metatheory of Morals.” So is this going to be an excursion into Aristotle, Aquinas via Maritain, Kant, all three, or something else? I have no idea, so save the date (April 23), show up in delightful Rutherford, New Jersey, and you can hear the answer for yourself.

Better yet, submit a paper–but hurry up, because there’s only five weeks before the deadline. (That means you, Gordon, Carrie-Ann, and Michael.)

Please circulate the CFP to interested parties in your networks, and especially to adjuncts with opinions on the controversy over adjunct employment conditions, since there’s a dedicated session on that topic.

2nd Call: CFP, Tenth Annual Conference of the Felician Institute for Ethics and Public Affairs

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CALL FOR PAPERS

The Tenth Annual Conference of the Felician Institute for Ethics and Public Affairs will be held in the Educations Commons Building of Felician University’s Rutherford campus, 227 Montross Ave., Rutherford, NJ 07070, on Saturday, April 23, 2016, from 9 am – 6 pm.

Plenary Speaker:
J.L.A. Garcia (Boston College)
“Grounding the Metatheory of Morals”

Submissions on any topic in moral or political philosophy (broadly construed) are welcome, not exceeding 25 minutes’ presentation time (approximately 3,000 words). Please send submissions via email in format suitable for blind review by March 1, 2016 to felicianethicsconference@gmail.com.

Completed papers are preferred to abstracts, but abstracts will be considered. Authors should ensure that they are available to appear at the conference on the conference date before submitting.

Presentations are invited for a special panel discussion on the ethics, politics, and economics of adjuncting. The invitation is open to all, adjuncts and non-adjuncts alike, from within philosophy and outside of the field.

Please direct questions to Irfan Khawaja at felicianethicsconference@gmail.com.

CFP: Tenth Annual Conference of the Felician Institute for Ethics and Public Affairs

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CALL FOR PAPERS

The Tenth Annual Conference of the Felician Institute for Ethics and Public Affairs will be held in the Educations Commons Building of Felician University’s Rutherford campus, 227 Montross Ave., Rutherford, NJ 07070, on Saturday, April 23, 2016, from 9 am – 6 pm.

Plenary Speaker:
Jorge Garcia (Boston College)
Topic TBA

Submissions on any topic in moral or political philosophy (broadly construed) are welcome, not exceeding 25 minutes’ presentation time (approximately 3,000 words). Please send submissions via email in format suitable for blind review by March 1, 2016 to felicianethicsconference@gmail.com.

Completed papers are preferred to abstracts, but abstracts will be considered. Authors should ensure that they are available to appear at the conference on the conference date before submitting.

Presentations are invited for a special panel discussion on the ethics, politics, and economics of adjuncting. The invitation is open to all, adjuncts and non-adjuncts alike, from within philosophy and outside of the field.

Please direct questions to Irfan Khawaja at felicianethicsconference@gmail.com.

New Blogger: Stephen Boydstun

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I’m happy to announce that Policy of Truth is getting yet another blogger, Stephen Boydstun. I don’t exactly remember where Stephen and I met, but I think it was either at Marsha Enright’s justifiably famous New Intellectual Forum “salon” in Chicago in the early 1990s, or at one of the Institute for Objectivist Studies summer seminars around the same time. Anyway, we met a long time ago, and we’ve been talking philosophy ever since. The last time we did that (in person, anyway) was 2013, at the epistemology seminar that Carrie-Ann and I did in Glen Ridge.

Here’s a bio of Stephen I found online:

My academic backgrounds are in physics, philosophy, and engineering. My engineering work was building locomotives, then I switched to nuclear power electrical generation. Engineering rounded out the understanding of the physical world I had from physics. Now all those backgrounds, and long study of philosophy, too, are put into my project of writing my own philosophy.

I created, financed, and edited Objectivity, a hardcopy “journal of metaphysics, epistemology, and theory of value informed by modern science” (1990-98). All issues of Objectivity are now freely available online for readers and researchers.

On the romantic side, my partner’s name is Walter. We have been together nineteen years. He has two sons and one grandson, now age fourteen. It is wonderful to have a family.

The last sentence of the first paragraph refers to a book that Stephen is currently working on, parts of which I believe he’ll be trying out on us. (Here’s another bio of Stephen I found, by the way.)

And here’s a bit about the book in question (written in December 2014):

I have been writing a book of philosophy since last January [2014]. It is my first. Throughout the preceding thirty years, I had written essays. Writing essays had to be stopped while I write this book. Into my book, as into all my previous essays, there goes a lot of study. My writings in philosophy are informed by the history of philosophy and contemporary philosophy and informed by mathematics and by modern physical science, engineering, biology, neuroscience, and psychology. …

I cannot share the title of my book at this time. It deals with metaphysics, epistemology, and theory of moral value. I shall not be treating esthetics. Theory of individual rights will be entered, but beyond that, I shall not undertake political philosophy.

So it looks like some of us are actually going to have to learn some science if we’re to understand what Stephen is talking about–something I haven’t bothered to do since the introductory Geology/Biology course I took in my sophomore year of college (roughly: “Rocks and Cells for Idiots 101”).

Like all PoT bloggers Stephen will be blogging whenever he wants. I have no idea when that will be, but until then, a warm welcome from the rest of the PoT crew….

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming of bad jokes and overheated polemics from yours truly.

Postscript, November 5, 2015: Stephen will be blogging under the online moniker “guyau.”

#OpenGaza: Trauma and Hope, First Hand

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Just a shout-out to anyone in the north Jersey area interested in attending this event, #OpenGaza: Trauma and Hope, First Hand, taking place this Tuesday, October 27, 8-10 pm at the Palestinian American Community Center of Clifton, New Jersey, 388 Lakeview Ave., Clifton, New Jersey 07011. Speakers include Dr. Yasser Abu-Jamei, Executive Director of the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, and Ran Goldstein, Executive Director of Physicians for Human Rights, Israel. The event is free. I’ll be there, and easy enough to pick out of the crowd–the fiftyish woman with stylish glasses, suave, oddly masculine looks, and black nail polish. (ht: Mondoweiss)

By coincidence, last month I spent a weekend “conferencing” with Izzeldine Abouelaish, founder of Daughters for Life and author of I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor’s Journey. Izzeldine, whose daughters and niece were killed in 2009 by Israeli rocket fire in Gaza, is one of those supposedly mythical Palestinians committed to peace despite having endured trauma at Israeli hands. More on Izzeldine’s book once I finish it; for now, I just couldn’t resist mentioning the coincidence of “two-doctors-from-Gaza-with-messages-of-hope-amidst-trauma.”

Mention Gaza to the average American news junkie, and the immediate association is “Hamas” and “Islamist fanaticism.” Not that those things don’t exist, but there are more things in Palestine than are dreamt up by such stereotypes, and I’d like to think that events like the PACC talk and like Izzeldine’s book and foundation will eventually break the reflexive associations of “Palestinian” with “wild-eyed religious psychopath” and replace them with something more respectful of reality. The audacity of hope, to borrow a phrase.

2015 FELICIAN INSTITUTE FALL SYMPOSIUM: THE ETHICS, POLITICS, AND ECONOMICS OF WATER

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I’m moving this back up to the top with several new links, and a few minor modifications. We’re hoping to add a fourth speaker; more on that soon.

The Fourth Annual Felician Institute Fall Symposium–“The Ethics, Politics, and Economics of Water”–will take place on Saturday, October 24, 2015 between 1 and 5 pm in the Education Commons Building on Felician’s Rutherford, New Jersey campus. Speakers include Joshua Briemberg, Representative for Program Development, WaterAid; Britt Long, Esq., an attorney in private practice and one-time litigator for the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation; and Donald R. Conger III, PE – Project Director with CH2M Operations & Management Services for the North Hudson Sewerage Authority. This event is co-sponsored by the Felician Institute for Ethics and Public Affairs, the Felician College Pre-Law Program, and the Felician College UN Fellows Program.

Moderator: Irfan Khawaja, Director, Felician Institute for Ethics and Public Affairs.

If you’re in the area, please stop by. The event is free and open to all. Refreshments will be served (yes, fresh water, too). For GPS purposes, the street address is: 223 Montross Ave., Rutherford, New Jersey, 07070. Please park in Lot D on Montross Avenue. The Ed Commons is the new, mostly steel- and glass-constructed, modern-looking building directly on Montross.

Here are some interesting water-oriented links worth reading to whet your appetite for the event and offer a sense of the range and ubiquity of the issues involved (not necessarily indicative of the content of any given speaker’s presentation):

Philosophical discussions 

Ali: This is my well. Lawrence: You obviously have not been keeping up with the literature on water rights, Ali. Have you not read Mattias Risse in JPP? That was last year. Are you not registered for the Felician Institute event on water? It’s in ten days. Ali: Did I happen to mention that this is my well? And that I’m the one with a gun?

Policy-based and journalistic discussions from a global perspective

Policy-based and journalistic discussions with a domestic (American) focus

wateraid (1)

Adjuncting at Al Quds

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I’m happy to report that I’ve just accepted an offer do some adjunct teaching this summer for the Philosophy Dept at Al Quds University in the West Bank town of Abu Dis (in Area B, under joint Palestinian-Israeli control). I’m a big fan of Al Quds, and of the Philosophy Dept there. This will be a return trip for me, and I’m very glad for the opportunity to go back.

Photo credit: “Mur abou dis”. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons – http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mur_abou_dis.jpg#/media/File:Mur_abou_dis.jpg

I’ll be teaching a single section of political philosophy–Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Mill, and Marx–to about fifteen Palestinian undergraduates. I’ll be teaching in English, the students will be reading in Arabic, and a translator will be there to translate our conversations to one another. I gave three lectures at Al Quds back in 2013 under a similar arrangement, and it was one of the most challenging-rewarding experiences I’ve ever had. Believe it or not, there’s already a literature on experiences of this sort, so I guess I’ll be taking my copy of Carlos Fraenkel’s Teaching Plato in Palestine for guidance, and comparing notes with him. (The last time I was in Palestine, I vividly remember thinking that Plato in particular seemed intensely relevant to the place.)

I’m looking forward to blogging this summer for PoT from Abu Dis and from the West Bank (and Israel) generally. I’m hoping to do some “political sightseeing” throughout the West Bank and Israel, and would be grateful for any questions PoT readers have about local conditions that help me frame the sightseeing and blogging I do.

By sheer coincidence, I’m also looking forward to connecting with a Felician student of mine, Hilwa Abdallah, whose family is from Ramallah and who will be there when I am. I understand that I’m invited to dinner, and I intend to eat without takallaf. How I manage to navigate Ramadan in the West Bank remains to be seen.

You’ve Got Another (Academic) Thing Coming

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Passover and Easter are coming up, signifying events of cosmic significance: Easter heralds the Resurrection, Passover the Jews’ exodus from bondage in Egypt. Customarily, both holidays betoken the coming of spring, at least in the Northern Hemisphere. But most importantly of all, both days bring glad tidings of …wait for it…yes, the height of the academic conference season. April showers bring May flowers, but April’s conference presentations bring next season’s peer-reviewed publications. “April is the cruelest month, breeding/Manuscripts out of the dead land….”

Anyway, with that preface, I’m happy to announce the schedule for the Ninth Annual Conference of the Felician Institute for Ethics and Public Affairs. It’ll take place all day, Saturday, April 25 at Felician’s Rutherford, New Jersey campus (223 Montross Ave, Rutherford NJ, 07070). The plenary speaker is James Stacey Taylor of The College of New Jersey, defending the idea of markets in political votes. As usual, we’re fielding twenty papers this year–two sessions on meta-ethics, one on well-being and related issues, two on moral psychology, two on social/political philosophy, one on virtue ethics, one on bioethics, and one (for lack of a better description) on ethics and literature (featuring papers on Proust and Kierkegaard). Come by if you’re in the area; I’m hoping to post some of the papers online before the conference so that you can take a look even if you can’t make it to the conference itself.

While I’m in announcement mode, I thought I’d mention some PoT-head doings that the doers are too bashful to brag about on their own (or on her own, as it may be). Shawn Klein of Rockford College has just announced the imminent publication of an edited collection, Steve Jobs and Philosophy: For Those Who Think Different, from Open Court. Occasional PoT-head Carrie-Ann Biondi has a paper among sixteen others in there, called “Counter-Culture Capitalist” (which I’ve read in manuscript and rather like). As it happens, Carrie-Ann is speaking this Thursday (April 2) at Rockford College on a somewhat similar topic, “Mike Rowe and Ayn Rand: Somebody’s Gotta Do It“; the talk is sponsored by the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship at Rockford.

While I’m singing Carrie-Ann’s praises, I may as well mention her (rather pugillistically titled) discussions of Marx, MacIntyre, and Rawls in “Three Enemies of Capitalism,” Parts I and II, which began life as a pair of lectures at The Atlas Society’s 2014 Atlas Summit. Here’s the first lecture, and here’s the second.

Finally, Roderick Long is announcing a Call for Abstracts for a Molinari Society session on “Police Abuse: Solutions Beyond the State” at the APA’s Eastern Division Meeting, due date May 18.  Of course, I couldn’t possibly announce a CFA on that topic and not cap it off with something like this….

You might as well begin to put some abstracts in your life.