PEA Soup

Welcome, Simon Keller!

We are pleased to announce that Simon Keller has accepted our invitation to become a contributor here at PEA Soup.  Simon is presently a Senior Research Fellow at CAPPE at the University of Melbourne and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Boston University, and he is slated to join the Philosophy Program at Victoria University of Wellington as an Associate Professor.  His book, The Limits of Loyalty, has recently come out, and he works on such topics as patriotism, love, and welfare (among others).  It's great to have you aboard, Simon!

Now YOU TOO Can Get Your Head Examined!

Thomas Nadelhoffer, et al. (from the Experimental Philosophy Blog) invite you to take a walk on the other side of experimental philosophy by being part of a survey that will compare/contrast the intuitions of philosophers and non-philosophers on a variety of topics.  Follow this link for the fun....

Three Cheers for These PEA Brains!

In lieu of the customary "here-are-some-amazing-statistics-about-PEA-Soup" birthday message, we thought it would be better to post a "Yearbook" to share some good things that have happened to some of our fellow PEA brains over this past year.  A lot of good news appears below the fold.  If there is any more good news that should be shared, by all means please add it in the comments section.

Puzzling Hiring Practices

Last year about this time, Kris McDaniel posted some important questions about the nature of the hiring process in philosophy, particular with respect to APA interviews.  I’d like to resurrect one of Kris’s questions for a new round of discussion as well as add another.

Welcome Dale Miller!

We are pleased to announce that Dale Miller has accepted our invitation to be a contributor here at PEA Soup.  Dale is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Co-Director of the Institute for Ethics and Public Affairs at Old Dominion University, and specializes in history of ethics (especially Mill), ethical theory (especially consequentialism), and social-political philosophy.  It's great to have you aboard, Dale!

NEH Seminar Announcement

Confucianism and Contemporary Virtue Ethics

We are excited to be co-directing an NEH Summer Seminar Traditions Into Dialogue: Confucianism and Contemporary Virtue Ethics, to take place from Monday, July 7 through Friday, August 15 (six weeks) at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut.

Responsibility Without Identity

It’s taken to be a platitude of folk morality that I can only be morally responsible for my own actions.  Call this The Platitude.  Sometimes The Platitude is presented in a more expansive form: (a) I can be responsible for my own actions; and (b) I cannot be responsible for anyone else’s actions.  This platitude is then taken to entail what I’ll call The Slogan: moral responsibility presupposes personal identity.  Classical philosophers who have embraced The Slogan include Locke, Reid, and Butler, and contemporary philosophers who do so include DeGrazia, Glannon, Haksar, Madell, Parfit (on one reading), Schechtman, and Sider.  Nevertheless, The Slogan is false.  Responsibility doesn’t presuppose identity, even if The Platitude is true.

Call for Papers

The Committee for the Graduate Conference in Political Theory at Princeton University welcomes papers concerning any period, methodological approach, and/or topic in political theory, political philosophy, and/or the history of political thought, for a conference at Princeton April 11-12, 2008.  For more details, visit the conference website.  Questions or comments may be directed to polthry@princeton.edu.

The Jollimore Times

Congratulations to our own Troy Jollimore for the very positive review he just got in this past Sunday's NY Times for his book of poems Tom Thomson in Purgatory.  Here are some excerpts from the review:

"Troy Jollimore writes a different kind of American poem: brash, funny, driven by the extravagance of dramatic persona rather than the rigor of the observed life. ...  Jollimore is a prancer, a turner of phrases. ... Jollimore's mimicry is acute, not naive, for he stresses that identity is a sweet illusion: whatever lies "deep down" in us is really a tissue of borrowed material."

Well done, Troy!

Libertarians and Universal Health Care

Timed with the current national release of Michael Moore’s Sicko, I have a (fairly) honest question: why do political libertarians reject the idea of state-financed universal health care?  Now I know why they say they do: it would interfere with our individual liberty to do what we like with the products of our labor.  Taxing me to provide health benefits for other citizens simply forces me to work X amount of hours for a distribution of those goods I didn’t (or wouldn’t) choose, in the same way federal arts funding forces me to work for other people’s enjoyment of art and opera that I myself might never want to indulge in.  Nevertheless, there seems a simple bootstrapping argument available to the fans of universal health care, and I don’t quite see why libertarians would resist it.  Perhaps you can help.