PEA Soup

May 2012 Books Received

Authors and/or their presses kindly sent at least one of the editors the following books.

 

Philosophy of Happiness: The Video

Philosophers have long debated the nature of happiness, with some saying that happiness is just a certain kind of psychological state and others claiming that true happiness is not just a matter of having certain feelings but also requires genuine virtue.

The new field of experimental philosophy may not be able to help us arrive at a definitive resolution of this age-old debate, but at the very least, it does seem to have inspired a very funny interactive video!

(Note: To go through this interactive video, you have to click at the end of each segment to begin the next one.)

 

 

 

Options, Actions, and Indeterminism

It is fairly common to give a conditional analysis of an option, e.g.:

(CAO) Performing an act X at a future time t1 is an option for a subject S at the present time t0 if and only if S would perform X at t1 if S were to intend (to try, to decide, or to choose) at t0 to perform X at t1.

I know that there are a host of problems with such conditional analyses, but let’s set those aside for the moment, for I want to address what seems to be an unappreciated worry concerning the possibility of indeterminism.

Welcome to Coons and Faraci!

It's my pleasure to welcome Christian Coons and David Faraci (individually, not as a tag team) to PEA Soup.  Christian is an assistant professor of philosophy at Bowling Green State University, doing really interesting work in moral philosophy (metaethics, value theory, normative ethics and more).  David Faraci is ABD at Bowling Green and starts a job as a VAP in philosophy at Virginia Tech this fall.  David's dissertation is on the nature of normativity, and he and I have also published (or are soon to publish) a few papers on experimental philosophy and moral responsibility.  David has also been a longtime commenter on PEA Soup.  It's great to have you both aboard!

Updates to PEA Soup

In light of feedback some of you have sent to the editors over the past several months, we have finally been able to make a few improvements to PEA Soup.  You've likely already noticed the most important ones, but just to make it "official," a brief description is below the fold:

Purdue Conference on Challenges to Religious and Moral Belief

On September 6-8, 2012, Purdue University will host an interdisciplinary conference entitled "Challenges to Religious and Moral Belief: Disagreement and Evolution".

The conference will focus on three main challenges to religious and moral beliefs:

1. Widespread interpersonal disagreement among intellectual peers on religious and on moral topics provides reason to doubt these beliefs;
2. Belief-source disagreement on moral issues between commonsense moral intuitions and religious belief sources raises doubts about both methods of belief formation;
3. Evolutionary accounts of the origins of our religious and moral beliefs creates doubts about these beliefs by undermining our confidence in the reliability of their sources.

Conference Participants: