EDITOR 

JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 

Applications and nominations are invited for the position of Editor of the Journal of the History of Philosophy. The Editor will serve a five-year renewable term beginning July 1, 2010. The Journal, an international quarterly, publishes articles, notes, discussions, and reviews devoted to the history of Western philosophy, broadly conceived. The Editor must be a leading scholar in an area of the history of Western philosophy. It is also expected that the Editor’s home institution will provide operating support that supplements that from the publisher, Johns Hopkins University Press, and the Board of Directors. The Editor is responsible to the Board of Directors for the editorial process of the Journal, which includes supervision of the refereeing process for submitted manuscripts, issue composition, and relations with the publisher.

Initial expressions of interest should be made by September 30, 2009. Complete applications, including a copy of the applicant’s C.V., must be received by December 31, 2009, to be considered. Send all correspondence preferably by e-mail to: 

martinich@mail.utexas.edu 

or by post to

Prof. Al Martinich, Search Committee Chair
Department of Philosophy
1 University Station
University of Texas at Austin
Austin, TX 78712
USA

The Journal of the History of Philosophy is committed to equal opportunity and affirmative action in all appointment decisions.

In his latest article for WHiP, Richard Pimentel considers the impact of two major economic schools of thought on the public’s acceptance of President Obama’s 2009 economic stimulus package. The “rightness” or “wrongness” of a particular economic theory may have less to do with the actual merits or demerits of a given system and more to do with how the public percieves the outcomes of that system.

Perception must be taken into account when discussing the ARRA package and the economy in general. For this reason, the current administration in the White House has carefully and intentionally presented the state of the economy in a way that will affect the perception of the people. This is not an accusation that the administration misrepresents the state of affairs. Rather it is an argument that this administration, just like every other administration, realizes that perception is important in shaping the economy.

See the full article here.

The president rejected the "false choice between sound science and moral values" that supposedly characterized the Bush policy. He declared that his administration would "make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology." Promoting science, Obama said, means "letting scientists . . . do their jobs, free from manipulation or coercion" and "listening to what they tell us, even when it’s inconvenient."

But science is not an unqualified good, and scientific ends do not justify any and all means. It is not "manipulation" or "coercion" or "ideology" to insist that scientific research – especially when funded by taxpayers – be restrained by moral and ethical guardrails.

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2009/03/15/embryos_and_ethics/?p1=Well_MostPop_Emailed6

French physicist and philosopher Bernard d’Espagnat has won the 2009 Templeton Prize, billed as the world’s largest annual award to an individual, for his work affirming the spiritual dimension of life.

The Templeton Foundation announced the $1.42 million prize at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Paris on Monday.

http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUSTRE52F2GC20090316

The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded $400,000 over two years to the Indiana Philosophy Ontology project — InPhO for short — which is creating interactive, digital tools to help students and scholars explore the discipline of philosophy.

http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/10158.html

Blogger “muddle” for The Citizen Online writes a lengthy and very intelligent review of a relatively new book by well-known dualists Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro. The book is called, simply enough, Naturalism , and muddle goes through the volume chapter by chapter summarizing each. The review does a nice job capturing the essential arguments of the book and gives such a healthy overview of the volume that one could provide a précis of its core arguments without having read the actual work.

In reading the review and the book, it struck me that there has not been much progress in ascending many of the difficulties facing naturalism. It seems to me that naturalists need something of a Copernican Revolution in metaphysics in order to change the playing field enough to provide a foundation for the answers the movement requires.

Of course, if we already know that mental properties just are constituted by physical properties and thus supervenient in this way, then we must agree. But this is precisely the point in dispute, and apart from such a stipulation such worlds appear to be conceivable. (Similarly, if Hitler is depraved, and his depravity is constituted by some combination of his natural properties, then there is no possible world in which someone is naturally indiscernible from Hitler but is not depraved. But this observation alone will hardly satisfy the moral skeptic who wonders why we should think that moral properties like depravity exist in the first place.)

http://www.thecitizen.com/~citizen0/node/35017

Naturalism seems to face some insurmountable problems like the identity problem. If the properties of a first-person experience are metaphysically distinct from the properties of the physical material in which the experience seems to take place, how can they be identical? Do you think naturalism can overcome such challenges? Discuss this question in Philosophy News forums.

In his latest article for WHiP, Richard Pimentel explores the recent violence in India against Christian conversions as well as some of the abuses by Christians that elicited the violence. Should Christians use bribes and false promises to make converts? Should Hindus use violence against those Christians who use such means to make converts? What kind of epistemology should one employ when “making converts” in the first place? Richard’s article is informed by recent trips he’s made to India and his experience of the problems first hand.

It is important to repeat that no forced or fraudulent conversion should be tolerated no matter whose adherents are guilty of this. But this does not justify burning homes and churches, displacing populations, and murdering converts and missionaries to preserve the Hinduness of Indian society. Moreover, the same radicals that cry out against conversion are not willing to address the rampant discrimination that has occurred and continues to occur against Dalits and women.

http://news.philosophynews.com/whip/forcing-the-will-to-believe/

Discuss in the forums.