Political Philosophy Podcast Symposium Schedule

I’m very happy to announce that the Fall 2008 Political Philosophy Podcast Symposium will commence this Friday. Each week, for the next ten weeks of the semester, we will have a paper podcasted on the site along with comments from a responder. The ten papers were chosen from a number of submitted abstracts through a process of blind review by four members of the website.

Part of the purpose of the symposium is to create a forum in which political philosophers around the world can attend and participate in a weekly political philosophy talk, albeit virtually. The authors have been asked to podcast their papers as a way to approximate the conditions of an in-person talk as closely as possible. Each post will contain an mp3 audio file, a pdf document of the paper, as well as a pdf document containing the responder’s comments. Thus, it will be possible to read the paper as the speaker is talking through it.

We hope to have more such symposia in the future. There is no reason why political philosophers should not be able to listen and respond to a quality political philosophy talk every week. Naturally, we are not audio experts, so we may not quite sound like a professional radio station as we proceed. But we should be able to work out problems and make improvements as we gain experience with the medium. All suggestions for improvement are welcome.

You can listen to the podcasts, either directly at the site, or by downloading them through iTunes. You can subscribe to Public Reason podcasts on iTunes by following this link. This way you can download the audio files to your mp3 player and listen to the talks in your car, train, favourite coffee shop, etc. (Whilst you are at it, you can also subscribe to Public Ethics Radio and Ethics Bites.)

This semester’s schedule is over the fold:

19 September: Alexander Sager (Calgary), “What Immigrants Owe Society: Obligations of Integration?”
Comments by Matthew Lister (Pennsylvania).

26 September: Kevin Vallier and Gerald Gaus (Arizona), “The Role of Religion in a Publicly Justified Polity: The Implications of Convergence, Asymmetry, and Political Institution.”
Comments by Jon Quong (Manchester).

3 October: Jessica Wolfendale (Melbourne), “Torture Lite and the Normalisation of Torture.”
Comments by David Sussman (Illinois, Urbana-Champaign).

10 October: Laurie Shrage (Florida International University), “Does the Government Need to Know Your Sex?”
Comments by Lori Gruen (Wesleyan).

17 October: Justin Weinberg (South Carolina), “Is Government Supererogation Possible?”
Comments by Helena de Bres (Wellesley).

24 October: Scott Anderson (British Columbia) “Coercion as Enforcement.”
Comments by William Edmundson (Georgia State).

31 October: Thomas Porter (Oxford), “Distributive Subjectivism and the Expensive Tastes Intuition.”
Comments by Zofia Stemplowska (Manchester).

7 November: David Wiens (Michigan), “Towards a Realistic Moral Theory of State Sovereignty.”
Comments by Simon Caney (Oxford).

14 November: Xavier Marquez (Victoria University, Wellington), “Unhappy Families: Three Ways of Thinking about Imperfect Political Regimes.”
Comments Thom Brooks (Newcastle).

21 November: Paul Gowder (Stanford), “Democratic Authorship as Political Autonomy.”
Comments by Ben Saunders (Oxford).