The January 28th talk has been changed due to a schedule conflict
1-14-2014: What
is Justice?
David Pruessner, JD, LLM
All across America court
houses
inscribe the word “justice” in stone, and promise to deliver
“justice.” Yet, the judges inside constantly differ
on what
it means to achieve justice. These disagreements
are much
more than subjective arguments based on a judge’s personal
views. Each judge’s view of justice tends to fall
into one
of several “camps,” each of which has a long tradition in Western
Civilization. And, each of these traditions found its way
into
some portion of our United States Constitution, such as equal
protection, due process, equitable jurisdiction, etc..
David
Pruessner, a Dallas civil lawyer for more than 30 years, will address
the different theories of civil justice as they are applied on a daily
basis in courts of law, particularly the United States’ Supreme
Court. He will examine individual cases, including one murder
case in which Supreme Court justices handed down their conflicting
opinions, each following one of the long traditions of what it means to
render justice.
1-28-2014: The burgeoning resurgence of Aristotle’s notions of formal and final causation
David Drumm
Aristotle
believed that four categories were necessary to explain the phenomena
of causation, which he described as material, formal, efficient and
final causation. In the wake of the Newtonian scientific revolution,
the paradigm emerged that causation could be adequately explained using
only the categories of efficient causation (a mechanical force acting
on an object) and material causation (the material structural
composition of objects).
This simplification of the Aristotelian
framework has been challenged by two emerging developments. First,
recent work in the study of epigenetics has shown that the development
of an organism through cellular division and differentiation is better
explained through a theory of developmental (or morphogenetic) fields
than with theories of mechanical causation, echoing Aristotle’s
category of Formal cause. Secondly, the study of morphodynamic and
thermodynamic systems (such as ice crystal formation or whirlpools) has
led to the postulate by Terrence Deacon of Berkeley and others that
theories of end-directed purposive processes provide a better
explanatory model than mechanical or efficient causation in the case of
complex evolutionary dynamic systems. So maybe four categories of
causation does not violate the principle of Ockham’s razor after all,
as aptly summarized by Steve McIntosh in his recent work Evolutions’
Purpose.
2-11-2014:
How and Why Religion Developed
David Alkek, M.D.
Since
Emile Durkheim's ground-breaking work, other important workers and
thinkers have discussed the possible scenarios for the development of
religion in human culture. This discussion will include the
evolutionary, paleontologic, and sociologic studies of Robert Bellah,
Jared Diamond, Karen Armstrong, and the neuroscientific research of
Andrew Newberg. We will investigate issues such as the definition of
religion, the functions of religion, the roles of play, ritual, and
myth in the development of religion, and the role of the brain's
evolution in religious evolution. The conclusion may be that
religion is neurologically programmed and will not go away for a long
time.
2-25-2014:
Results of the 1929 Cassirer-Heidegger Davos debate that
still matter
Gary R. Brown, Ph.D.
Reverberations
are still being felt from the seismic shift in Continental philosophy
that took place at Davos, Switzerland, in 1929 in the no holds barred
disputation between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger. The event
climaxed a two-week conference, during which Cassirer and Heidegger
lectured separately on topics that would lead to their featured
confrontation, an abstract of which has been published in Heidegger’s
Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, and recently (2010) in Peter
Gordon’s Continental Divide. The disputation occurred mostly as a
conflict of interpretations of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, as both
of these most famous philosophers in Germany had been trained in the
then competing and dominant schools of neo-Kantian thought. My talk
will focus on the differences between them by examining the use each
makes in their own work of the central core of Kant’s First Critique,
the Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding. With this
focus, I hope to clarify why the confrontation altered the course of
Continental philosophy and still remains an open issue in European
thought.
3-11-2014:
At the Crossroads of Freedom and Facticity: Ambiguity in
Simone de Beauvoir.
Geoffrey Manzi, M.A.
A longtime
collaborator and
romantic partner of Simone de Beauvoir, fellow existentialist
philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre famously said that man is “condemned to be
free,” to which he adds, “we are a freedom which chooses, but we do not
choose to be free” (Being and Nothingness). Such claims
encapsulate the Existentialist understanding of the human condition as
inherently bipolar: on the one hand, every individual is born into a
particular pre-established set of circumstances to which she did not
consent and, as such, limits her future possibilities; however, equally
primordial is the fact that everyone is born with the freedom to accept
or reject many aspects of one’s inherent circumstances—especially the
seemingly preordained roles that one’s circumstances appear to impress
upon an individual—for the sake of creating new circumstances for
oneself in light of pursuing a goal that one freely
chooses. Furthermore, the decision to pursue certain
endeavors
tends to follow from the values that one freely creates for oneself,
thereby encouraging one to take on roles of her own accord and, as
such, engage in the ultimate project of forging a personal identity
whose constitutive character is oriented (projected) toward the future
and, therefore, remains open to continuous revision and revaluation.
Because the human being appears to inhabit simultaneously
the poles of determinate facticity and radical freedom, human existence
is characteristically ambiguous. Accordingly, the first half
of
my presentation explores several related ways in which Beauvoir’s
notion of ambiguity—understood broadly as the paradox of one’s
“situated freedom”—acts as a structural feature of human existence.
Of course, human beings face constant temptations to
evade the anxiety of existing, what with its incessant demand for
choice and uncompromising self-accountability. To that end, Beauvoir
identifies various possible ways in which one might abuse or retreat
from the inescapable freedom one has to create a life for
oneself. In the second half of my presentation, I flesh out
some
concrete examples of this denial of the ambiguity of existence as it
manifests in the life of the nihilist (and, perhaps by extension, the
cynic and the comedian), the serious person, the adventurer, and the
passionate person, respectively.
3-25-2014:
The Natural Basis for an Ethic of Care
Gerald Casenave, M.D.
The fundamental question
of ethics is
not “What is the right thing to do?” The fundamental question
is
“Why be ethical?” If there is a divine basis for ethics, the
answer is simple, “To not get punished.” But post Nietzsche,
it
is problematic to base ethics on religion. Rationality
produces
the categorical imperative which is formal and without content, and
leads to the question of “Why be rational?” The idea of
finding a
natural basis for ethics has always been appealing, but by nature we do
terrible things to each other. Hume argued that ethics
derives
from feelings. Scheler laid out a non-formal ethics of
value. Ian McGilchrist argues that ethics arises as a feeling
in
the non-dominant, usually right, hemisphere.
Heidegger argues that the fundamental nature of human being
is
care; we care about the world. We evaluate and determine
worth. Our care and concern about the world is a continuum,
from
just noticing to caring about intensely. We are strange
creatures
that care about the infinitesimally small and the ungraspable immensity
of the universe. We have increasing explicit knowledge of the
connectedness of things. Out of these aspects of our nature
arises the soft obligation we have to take care of each other and the
world.
Our ethical feeling and care about each
other and things is fragile. It develops when nurtured and
encouraged. It can be extinguished. Ethical
reasoning, as
Kohlberg first laid it out, appears to advance from Pre-Conventional to
Conventional to Post-Conventional, when such development is
fostered. But only with the Gilligan corrective, the
component of
care, does ethical reasoning lead to acting ethically.
4-8-2014:
Anchoring, Imaginative Variation, and Existential
Phenomenology:
On the problem of naturalizing content in the philosophy of psychology
Frank Scalambrino, Ph.D., University of Dallas
What
we may call the primary question-problem complex today in the
philosophy of psychology and cognitive science involves the
interpretation of data regarding various human brain states.
At
the forefront of this question-problem complex is a tension between
first-person and third-person perspectives. Beyond material
naturalistic and normative behavioristic approaches which may seek to
eliminate first-person perspectives, my thesis seeks to interpret the
data, while at the same time affirming the first-person
perspective. My thesis differs from other approaches which
affirm
the first-person perspective in a number of ways. Most
noticeably, I suggest a shift from a Cartesian/Husserlian-based
vocabulary which heavily relies on the term “consciousness” to an
“existential”/Heidegger-based vocabulary, invoking terms such as
“being-in-the-world.” In this way, I argue for an
interpretation
of the data in terms of a being’s mnemonic-grasp (cf. Scalambrino,
2012) of its environment by critically discussing eliminative
interpretations of the data and the psychological activities of
“anchoring” and “imaginative variation.” My non-eliminative
position differs from similar positions in the emphasis I place on
memory and the manner in which I link memory and fundamental
ontology. Simply put, I argue memory goes “all the way down,”
and
I articulate being-in-the-world as a transcendental unity which
mnemonically encompasses empirical aspects indicated by brain states.
4-22-2014:
What Scientific/Methodological Skepticism Owes to Traditional
Philosophy
Erling Beck, President—North Texas Skeptics Society
Rooted in Martin Gardner’s Fads and
Fallacies in the Name of Science (1952), Methodological and Scientific
Skepticism are both recent and overlapping incarnations of the modern
skeptical movement, which was born, not to debunk, but to test the
claims made by pseudoscientists and opportunistic spiritualists.
“Skepticism" can be a loaded word, yet it has a rich intellectual
tradition that stretches over centuries. It incorporates techniques
pre-dating Pyrrho of Elis (365-275 BCE), credited as the founder of the
"school" of skepticism, to contributions as recent as Daniel Dennett’s
(1942- CE) Intuition Pumps.
5-13-2014:
Voodoo Pharmacology: Drug Use and Loss of Control
Jacob Sullum
Do drugs make people sin?
That myth
lies at the heart of the so-called war on drugs, argues Jacob Sullum, a
senior editor at Reason magazine and the author of Saying Yes: In
Defense of Drug Use (Tarcher/Penguin). Sullum, who blogs
about
drug policy for Forbes and writes a syndicated newspaper column, has
been covering the war on drugs from the perspective of a conscientious
objector for more than two decades. He maintains that the distinctions
drawn by our drug laws are morally arbitrary, reflecting mistaken
beliefs about the way people respond to certain intoxicants. If
Americans applied the same distinctions to illegal drugs that they
routinely apply to alcohol, he says, the injustice of
punishing
people for their taste in psychoactive substances would be impossible
to deny.
5-27-2014:
The Crisis of the Eastern Zhou and the Rise of Classical
Chinese Thought
J. Michael Farmer, Ph.D., University of Texas at Dallas
The Eastern Zhou dynasty
(ca. 770–256
BCE) is considered the axial age of Chinese philosophy, with “A Hundred
Schools of Thought” contending for patronage and prominence. Among
them, Confucius and Lao Tzu would eventually become household names (as
well as fodder for fortune cookie wisdom and internet memes). But what
was the reason behind this flowering of intellectual activity, and what
were the various thinkers proposing? This lecture will place the
thought and activity of key figures of the Confucian, Daoist, Mohist,
and Legalist schools into its original historical context, as well as
highlight the main ideas and socio-political programs of these
classical Chinese thinkers.