PEA Soup

Weighing Reasons in Princeton in late Fall (Workshop w CFP)

Errol Lord and Barry Maguire are organizing a two day workshop (Nov. 30- Dec. 1) dedicated to developing/criticizing systematic accounts of weighing reasons.

Invited Speakers: Ruth Chang (Rutgers), Stephen Darwall (Yale), John Horty (Maryland), Stephen Kearns (Florida State) & Daniel Star (Boston University), Joseph Raz (Oxford/Columbia), T.M. Scanlon (Harvard)  There is also a call for papers which are due by September 15th.  There's a link to the workshop website below the fold.

Philosophers at the Leveson Inquiry

All of you are of course aware that here in the UK there has been huge phone hacking scandal. This scandal lead to the Leveson Inquiry on Culture, Practice, and Ethics of Press. Last week, on Monday 16th of July, the Inquiry interviewed various philosophers on freedom of speech, human rights, democracy, and media ethics. These incredibly interesting interviews can be viewed online. The morning session is on this page:

http://www.levesoninquiry.org.uk/hearing/2012-07-16am/

The philosophers interviewed in this session are first Jennifer Hornsby (Birkbeck), Sue Mendus (York), and John Tasioulas (UCL). The second half of the session interviews Rowan Cruft (Stirling) and Chris Megone (Leeds). The afternoon session is here:

http://www.levesoninquiry.org.uk/hearing/2012-07-16pm/

It contains the interviews of Neil Manson (Lancaster) and Onora O'Neill (Cambridge). The page also has a link to an interesting witness statement from Jeremy Waldron (NYU).

Character Project Summer Seminar: “Character: New Perspectives and Empirical Discoveries”

June 17-29, 2013 - Wake Forest University

Seminar Leader: Christian Miller
Director, The Character Project

The goal of this seminar is to consider the existence and nature of character and virtue in light of various results in psychology. Participants will receive a stipend of $1,500 for attending, plus have their travel, meal, reading materials, and lodging costs covered. We expect to have several leading philosophers working in this area visit the seminar to each lead one meeting. The seminar meetings will conclude on Thursday, June 27, so that all participants can attend the Character Project final conference on June 27-29.

The application deadline is December 15, 2012. For more details please visit: http://www.thecharacterproject.com/summer.php

Mad Meta 9 Program

The program for the 9th annual metaethics workshop in Madison is posted here.  As usual, some Soupers are in the mix.

Call for Abstracts--Ethics and Explanation 2013: Explanation in Mathematics and Ethics

Ethics and Explanation 2013: Explanation in Mathematics and Ethics, University of Nottingham, 18th-19th January 2013.

The theme for the conference is ‘Explanation in Mathematics and Ethics’. The aim of the conference is to investigate: (i) the connections between indispensability-type arguments in mathematics and ethics; (ii) connections between evolutionary debunking-style arguments in mathematics and ethics and (iii) more generally, other connections between the two areas that touch on the issue of explanation. Abstracts should fall under the themes of the conference (broadly construed).

The 4th annual Arizona Workshop in Normative Ethics

The program is available from the workshop’s website:  http://ethics.arizona.edu/program.html.

Registration is free and open to all. You may register by emailing Mark Timmons -- see the workshop's website for his email address. Timmons will send periodic updates to those who register.

Feminists Encountering Animals

A free online forum sponsored by Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy and Wiley-Blackwell. Scheduled to run July 9 to 13, the invited symposium "Feminists Encountering Animals," published in the Animal Others special issue of Hypatia, is open for public comments and discussion.
 
Leading feminist animal studies scholars Lori Gruen (Ethics and Animals: An Introduction) and Kari Weil (Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now) invited six feminist scholars to reflect on trends within this burgeoning new field of scholarship. The online forum will include free access to their co-edited special issue in addition to commentary and real-time interaction among participants and authors—allowing for a lively discussion that extends the beyond the printed page.
 
The first posts went live at 11 A.M. EST on Mon, July 9 and can be found at the following address: http://philosophy-compass.com/phileye/online-events/hypatia-symposium/. No registration is necessary.

Scanlon Interview

Pretty amazing and exhaustive interview by The Utopian with Tim Scanlon here.  A shorter version is here.

Emotional Responses Survey Results (Eli Weber, guest poster)

Here is Eli's discussion of the survey results:

Thanks again to everyone who took the emotional responses survey.  Below are the cases and response data for the first 100 responses.  I’ve given a bit of analysis following each case, and there are some general remarks following that.  First, I wanted to say just a bit about what I was up to here.

Survey: Emotional Responses

Eli Weber, a graduate student at Bowling Green, has designed a three-question survey about emotional responses to past perceived injuries that ought to yield some interesting results.  Please take the survey here, and perhaps Eli will discuss the results in a few days.