Good Luck!

Good luck to the students who are off to the University of Calgary Graduate Conference!

Upcoming Invited Speaker

Just to remind everyone, this Friday's invited speaker is Dennis Klimchuk. Professor Klimchuk is a UofM grad who now teaches at the University of Western Ontario.

He'll be giving a talk entitled "The Rule of Private, Common Law."

There is a dinner planned in the evening after the talk. For more information, please contact Neil McArthur in the philosophy department.

Professor Klimchuk's homepage can be found here:

http://www.uwo.ca/philosophy/department/facultyandstaff/dklimchuk/

A Question

Here's a question you don't need that damn My Questions application to answer. I am curious to know what folks think is the best book about philosophy written for a non-philosophical audience? Please feel free to justify your choice, or not. My own $0.02: The Metaphysical Club, by Louis Menand.

Aufbau Call for Papers

Call for Papers

Aufbau

The Canadian Graduate Journal of Philosophical Analysis

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Aufbau: The Canadian Graduate Journal of Philosophical Analysis was founded so that young philosophers, working in the tradition of analytic philosophy, would have a venue for publishing their research. Aufbau publications are accessible by everyone online as well as in print. Anyone enrolled in a philosophy graduate program is eligible to submit a paper.

The Aufbau editorial team is currently accepting original submissions for the next Aufbau publication. Interested authors are invited to submit papers on any philosophical topic on or before: November 15, 2007.

Papers should be no more than 3,500 words. Papers must be in accordance with current APA standards. Papers must be prepared for blind review, with author’s name, university affiliation, mailing address and email address appearing in a separate document. Submission must be either Word (i.e. *.doc), Rich Text Format (i.e. *.rtf), or Portable Document Format (i.e. *.pdf) documents. All papers must be submitted as email attachments. Please include "Aufbau Submission" in the subject line.

Submissions and questions can be emailed to: aufedit@cc.umanitoba.ca

Interested parties can visit Aufbau online at: http://www.umanitoba.ca/faculties/arts/philosophy/AUFBAU.htm

Aufbau is affiliated with The University of Manitoba Philosophy Department.

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Philosophical Fridays Round Two: Wes McPherson

Thanks to everybody who came out to Ori Simchen's talk today, as well as to lunch, the reception, and dinner.

I just wanted to make known to everyone that Wes McPherson will be giving a presentation of his paper on Wilfrid Sellars next Friday. Same time, same place- 386 UC.

It *might* be possible to organize a small punch-event afterwards, so please comment if you would support that as well.

Also, please see the excellent post by Wes below for a link to his paper. Thanks Wes. And, since no Sellars photo was available, I went with the next best thing...

Wes on Sellars

Hello all,

For those of you who are interested in my presentation of my Sellars paper, "A Brief Summary of the Philosophy of Wilfrid Sellars", you can download it at:

http://www.geocities.com/suck_lutz/ABriefSummaryof.doc

Please let me know if this doesn't work for you. It works for my Mac anyways.

I really love Sellars, and would not mind questions from you about his philosophical project. Questions like: what are psychological nominalisms ramifications for universals? What happens to metaphysics and epistemology? What does Sellars think of qualia? Do animals think? Isn't Sellars a linguistic idealist? How does Sellars answer Quine? Heidegger? Churchland? Where are we left with empirical philosophy? What happens to the analytic tradition? etc. I think philosophy works best as a dialogue or as a kind of therapy, so I'd appreciate your participation. There is a lot to explain here, since Sellars' philosophy has deep and vast implications.

I'll try to focus on psychological nominalism and the fusion of the images in my presentation, to narrow things down a bit.

Thanks everyone. I hope this post is non-sucky!

Blog-Checking

Some have rightly commented that it can be a pain going around and checking for updates on several blogs. This helps your life.

Grad Conference in Metaphysics of Causation

I thought some of you might be interested in this. I'm not sure whether it was tracked in any of the more usual conference sources to the right.

Job?

Laurie has asked me to spread the word that there are still some Grader/Marker positions to be filled in the department, and that the deadline for applying has been extended to next Monday.

That ends my commercial announcement. You may now return to your regular programming.

Toad Night and Student Presentation Schedule

I'm sure that by now everyone is aware of this, but I thought an official notice would be a good idea. The philosophy club now meets on Wednesday evenings, starting anywhere from 6pm on, at the Toad in the Hole pub. Hopefully everybody can make it out to that.

Also, I've received a couple of emails from other students wondering about the Philosophical Fridays speaker program and schedule. As I understand it, any Friday that is currently free (please see the calendar link) is available for student presentations (student presentations scheduled a long time in advance might have to be bumped a week here or there, if it happens that a new invited speaker is added to the current schedule).

So, again, if you are interested in doing something, then please choose a Friday and let everyone know by posting it up here (or let Chelsey or myself know about it, and we can add it to the calendar and make it known to others).

Thanks

Ori Simchen's Talk Friday Sept 14

There are a limited number of slots available for students to come to lunch or dinner with Prof. Simchen on the department's dime. If you're interested in free lunch or dinner, please email me at myfirstname[dot]mylastname[at]gmail[dot]com. Slots are available on a first-come, first-serve basis.

WCPA

I thought I'd note that, in case anyone is interested, it would seem that the WCPA could stand to use a goodly amount of commentators.

Philosophy-Club Email List

Justin has volunteered to collect new email addresses from interested students in the T/Th Logic class he T.A.'s. I can do the same in any of the seminars that I'm in this fall.



Just wondering: is there anyone who could volunteer to collect emails (by passing a sheet around) in any of the lower-level courses? Once we have them, the best thing to do is to forward them to Chelsey Booth, who is in charge of updating the database.



So far, no opinions have been voiced on the club-night issue. I assume that it will proceed on Thursday this week, as usual. If we're going to officially change it, I guess we should do that soon?