Lectures start
promptly at 7:30PM and are held on the 2nd and 4th Tuesdays of each
month September 2022 through December 13, 2022. Our meetings are held at the Olive
Garden, 9079 Vantage Point Drive, Dallas, TX 75243 (972)
234-3292, Zoom access will also be available.
9-13-2022 Make Philosophy: an Open Educational Resources Project to Bring Philosophy
to Life
Eli B. Shupe, Ph.D. , Assistant Professor, Philosophy and Humanities, UT Arlington
Dr. Eli Shupe (University of Texas at
Arlington) is the Director of Make Philosophy, an open educational
resources project scheduled to launch in Fall 2022. Make Philosophy is
a repository of games, objects, design files, and lesson plans intended
to bring academic philosophy to life in the classroom environment. Each
Make Philosophy module focuses on a particular thought experiment or
philosophical problem and makes use of physical objects with which
students can interact as they learn. Dr. Shupe will join us to
discuss the pedagogical research behind the Make Philosophy project,
her collaborations with colleagues and students in preparation for its
official launch, as well as her vision for using open access licensing
to allow philosophy educators worldwide to use Make Philosophy teaching
materials—for free—at their own institutions. Fittingly, the
presentation will be an interactive one: participants will have the
opportunity to test several prototype lesson modules, each of which
focuses on a classic philosophical problem or thought experiment and
features physical objects that students can interact as they learn.
Click on the link below to view the meeting:
Passcode: 2W*SkQLx
9-27-2022 Death of A Republic
William (Bill) Denney, Ph.D.
A
Republic is a form of government ruled by representatves of the citizen
body, supposedly a stable and balanced system. However, the Roman
Republic unraveled and collapsed due to circumstances we may find
familiar. This presentation will review the time in which the Romans of
the Republic lived, what was important to them, how their government
worked, and what circumstances or human short-comings caused the death
of the republic. We’ll look at their final years of chaos and the
dichotomy between two major characters of the period—Caesar and Cicero.
As all history, this is a story about people like us.
Click on the link below to view the meeting:
Passcode: u2*TeD*7
10-11-2022 Consciousness and Projective Geometry
Kenneth Williford, Ph.D. , Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Philosophy and Humanities, UT Arlington
The
talk is an overview of the Projective Consciousness Model (PCM).
According to the PCM, the structure of consciousness approximates the
structure of a projective 3-space, and its dynamics is governed in part
by mechanisms of predictive error minimization employing projective
transformations. The PCM allows for the explanation of a number of
characteristic and puzzling phenomena closely associated with
consciousness: among other things, the first-person perspective,
pre-reflective self-consciousness, the capacity for intersubjectivity,
perspectival perceptual updating, the elusiveness of the "subject of
consciousness", and certain illusions (e.g., the Ames Room Illusion,
the Moon Illusion).
Click on the link below to join the meeting :
10-25-2022 What Friendship Has to Do with Learning
Jonathan Sanford, Ph.D. , President, University of Dallas, Professor, Philosophy Department, University of Dallas
What
is it to be well educated? How does one become well educated? Is the
purpose of a university to make its students well educated? If they
ever existed, long gone are the days when we can take for granted that
we all mean more or less the same thing when we say words like
‘university’ and ‘education’. Of course, nearly everyone sees a
connection between these two terms: someone goes to a university to
receive an education. But, what one takes to be an education varies
widely, with a preponderance towards some version of an utilitarian
account of education. That account goes something like this: a
university education is an investment which is made to achieve long
term revenue generation in one’s chosen field. A university, on this
utilitarian account, is that collection of specialized fields of study
which presents to students possible pathways to future employment.
Something like this is the dominant view of what a university is for,
and what education is all about.
Now, of course it is important
to plan for future employment. And, of course, universities can and
ought to play a role in such preparation. It is no slight to the
significance of gainful employment to recognize that the predominant
utilitarian view of the terms ‘education’ and ‘university’ improperly
puts accidents into the role of substance. In fact, I would even go so
far as to say that when you put the secondary role of preparing for a
career into the principal role of the foundational substance of a
university education, the achievement of that result is hampered. I
hope to say something worthwhile about the genuine substance of
university education in my remarks by emphasizing the significance of
two necessary features of any successful education, friendship and
educability. I will argue that any education requires a teachable
spirit, a virtue that the ancients and medievals called docilitas, and
that the lived encounter with others in pursuit of the principal goods
of an education are critical to the further cultivation and exercise of
the virtue of educability.
Click on the link below to view the meeting:
Passcode: 185@uiUM
11-8-2022 You Might Be a Stoic if . . .
Kent Fish, MD
How
then should we live? What does it mean to live a good life? Do we
need a philosophy of life to get there? The ancient philosophy of
Stoicism tries to help us find that answer. The modern day
meaning of stoic as being emotionless or cold does not do justice to
the vibrant, action-oriented, feeling Stoic who is interested in being
a better person and living a better life. We’ll look at Stoicism from
its origins with Zeno in Athens followed by the three most famous Roman
Stoics: Seneca (Nero’s tutor and playwright), Epictetus (a disabled
former slave), and Marcus Aurelius (emperor of Rome). Today, over
100,000 people are members of online communities for modern Stoics, and
there are meet-ups, conferences, and websites for those seeking to
master the Stoic way of life. But what is Stoicism, and what makes it
resonate so powerfully today? In this talk we will take a frolicking
tour of Stoicism by exploring the history, foundational ideas, cardinal
virtues, exercises, misconceptions, and practices of this ancient
philosophy of life. Then you can decide if you are (or want to
be) a Stoic
Click on the link below to view the meeting:Passcode: SUBZV@3C
11-22-2022 CANCELLED due to unforeseen circumstances, our speaker had to cancel
12-13-2022 Called to Concord: Aristotle, Aquinas, and Civic Friendship
Dr. Angela Knobel, Ph.D, Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Dallas
The
problem of civic strife is as old as political society itself.
Thus, it is fitting that several contemporary scholars have looked to
Aristotle, who maintained that friendship was of paramount importance
to political society, for insight into our contemporary ills. But
while Aristotle rightly recognizes the importance of civic friendship,
has an incomplete account of what it is and of what brings it
about. Indeed, Aristotle’s account seems to indicate that what
has happened in American society was not only inevitable, but that it
is also insoluble: it’s not clear, that is to say, that Aristotle can
offer us any way of improving our present situation. Can
Aquinas? Aristotle says that civic friendship is identical with
something that he calls “concord.” Aquinas, well aware of
Aristotle’s understanding of concord, also addresses concord, but he
does not treat it as a form of civic friendship. Concord, for
Aquinas, is a unity of wills and a proper effect of the infused
theological virtue of charity. Aquinas, that is to say, thinks that to
be united to God in friendship is to be brought into harmony with our
fellow man. In this paper I want to examine whether and how Aquinas’s
Christian and theological notion of concord might enable us to overcome
the seeming impasse that the more Aristotelian understanding seems to
culminate in. Aquinas’s account succeeds where Aristotle’s does
not, I will argue, because it demands more of us than Aristotle’s
does.
Click on the link below to view the meeting:
Passcode: ?Ns!7czh