Academia

You are currently browsing the archive for the Academia category.

Postgraduate Essay Prize, 2010

Res Publica: A Journal of Moral, Legal and Social Philosophy

For the sixth year running, Res Publica (the journal of the Association for Legal and Social Philosophy) will be awarding a prize for the best paper submitted by a current postgraduate student in 2010.  This may be in any area falling within the journal’s aims and scope, described below.  Entries should conform to the normal requirements for submissions - please see the website address below for details.

All entries must be received by 1 October 2010, with the winner to be announced in January 2011.  The winner will receive £100 and a year’s subscription to the journal.  The winning essay will be published in Volume 17 (2011).

Previous winners:
Alexandra Couto, ‘Privacy and Justification’ 12.3 (2006)
Alasdair Cochrane, ‘Animal Rights and Animal Experiments: An Interest-Based Approach’ 13.3 (2007)
Göran Duus-Otterström, ‘Betting Against Hard Determinism’ (14.3, 2008)
Seth Lazar, ‘The Nature and Disvalue of Injury’ (15.3, 2009)
Guy Sela, ‘Moral Luck and Liability Lotteries’ (forthcoming: 16.3, 2010)

The prize will be judged by a panel of referees, along with the journal editors.

Entries should be submitted via the journal’s website -
www.editorialmanager.com/resp - and labelled Postgraduate Essay Prize.

There is more information about Res Publica at www.springer.com/11158.  Or please contact the co-editors:

Gideon Calder - Email: Gideon.Calder@newport.ac.uk

Jonathan Seglow - Email: j.seglow@rhul.ac.uk

JOURNAL OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY:
An International Journal of Moral, Political, and Legal Philosophy

(ISSN 1740-4681)Volume 7, Number 1 (2010)

ARTICLES

William Sin, ‘Trivial Sacrifices, Great Demands’, pp. 3-15

Lina Papadaki, ‘What is Objectification?’ pp. 16-36

M. B. E. Smith, ‘Does Humanity Share a Common Moral Faculty?’ pp. 37-53

Jonathan Seglow, ‘Associative Duties and Global Justice’, pp. 54-73

Miriam Ronzoni, ‘Constructivism and Practical Reason: On Intersubjectivity, Abstraction, and Judgment’, pp. 74-104

Kenneth R. Westphal, ‘From “Convention” to “Ethical Life”: Hume’s Theory of Justice in Post-Kantian Perspective’, pp. 105-32

REVIEW ARTICLE

Wim de Muijnck, ‘Thinking about Normativity: Ralph Wedgwood on “Ought”‘, pp. 133-44

BOOK REVIEWS

Clare Chambers on Gender, Class, and Freedom in Modern Political Theory, pp. 145-47

Anca Gheaus on Disadvantage, pp. 148-50

Paul Bou-Habib on Climate Change, Justice, and Future Generations, pp. 151-53

All issues of the Journal of Moral Philosophy are available on Swetswise here and IngentaConnect here.

Subscription information can be found on our Brill website here.

Please direct all enquiries regarding article or discussion submissions to the Editor, Thom Brooks (Newcastle).

Please direct all enquiries regarding review articles and books for review to the Reviews Editor, Christian Miller (Wake Forest).

JOURNAL OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY:
An International Journal of Moral, Political, and Legal Philosophy
(ISSN 1740-4681)

Volume 6, Number 4 (2009)ARTICLES

Ty Landrum, ‘Persons as Objects of Love’, pp. 417-39

Elizabeth Tropman, ‘Renewing Moral Intuitionism’, pp. 440-63

David Alm, ‘Deontological Restrictions and the Good/Bad Asymmetry’, pp. 464-81

Carl Knight, ‘Egalitarian Justice and Valuational Judgment’, pp. 482-98

Geoffrey Scarre, ‘The “Banality of Good”?’ pp. 499-519

REVIEW ARTICLE

Sean Coyle, ‘The Ideality of Law’, pp. 521-34

BOOK REVIEWS

Stefan Bird-Pollan on The Founding Act of Modern Ethical Life: Hegel’s Critique of Kant’s Moral and Political Philosophy by Ideo Geiger, pp. 535-37

Justin Jeffrey on A Theory of Virtue: Excellence in Being for the Good by R. M. Adams, pp. 538-40

Adam Rawlings on Reasons and the Good by Roger Crisp, pp. 541-43

BOOKS RECEIVED

REFEREES FOR VOLUME 6

All issues of the Journal of Moral Philosophy are available on Swetswise here and IngentaConnect here.

Subscription information can be found on our Brill website here: http://www.brill.nl/jmp

Please direct all enquiries regarding article or discussion submissions to the Editor, Thom Brooks (Newcastle).

Please direct all enquiries regarding review articles and books for review to the Reviews Editor, Fabian Freyenhagen (Essex).

Veniamin Zatsepin

University of Melbourne, Faculty of Education

Table of Contents - Part 2:

Personality types as the elements of anthroposystem

What is human nature?

Where is the concept of evil human nature from?

Afterword

Acknowledgments

References

Personality types as elements of the anthroposystem

The anthroposystem and the social system are two aspects of the same developed human society. Both of them represent humankind as a single whole and both of them are organized and structured. But their structural and organizational elements, and consequently the objects of their attention, are different. The social system’s constructive elements are social institutions, each performing their specific functions of maintaining and regulating economic, political, legal, moral and other relations. The anthroposystem’s “cells”, the “points of references”, are informal social-psychological groups of personality types. The anthroposystem and social system are closely tangled, so these two systems influence each other, but at the same time they still remain relatively independent.

Read the rest of this entry »

Veniamin Zatsepin

University of Melbourne, Faculty of Education

Table of Contents - Part 1:

Preface

Creation of the concept of the social system

The social system in Marxist philosophy

Post-Marxist concepts of the social systems

Testing the social system theories

Into the fabric of social institutes

The basic personality types

Psychopath (sociopath)

Authoritarian personality

Machiavellian personality

“Technocratic”, “practical” or “hoarding” personality

Amiable, friendly or agreeable personality

Altruistic personality

Creative personality

Part 2:

Personality types as the elements of anthroposystem

What is human nature?

Where is the concept of evil human nature from?

Afterword

Acknowledgments

References

Preface

It has always made me feel uneasy reading or hearing someone trying to explain people’s inhumane acts, and even brutish violence, by recourse to the concept of “human nature”. On this explanation, there are really only two possibilities: either one is a criminal (or at least a potential criminal) or one is simply not a human being. At the same time, I still find it bewildering that our primeval ancestors, the illiterate people of the stone and bronze ages (and our contemporaries, the Aborigines of Australia and the Americas), while poorly versed in the theory of nature’s laws, knew and expressed in their everyday lives closer kinship with nature than do even the most educated of us today. Their attitude to each and every part of nature was more humane and respectful than that of the majority of our contemporaries, despite the fact that these people burned trees for fire and killed animals for food. So what has happened to modern people, to society? Does civilization, indeed, spoil us? Why have we been breaking our contracts or mutual understanding with the animate natural world? What has been pitting us against each other and why do we degrade and eliminate other people? Is it true that mankind is a malignant tumor of the body that is earth? Are we, human beings, indeed evil from our very childhood? And who and what exactly are ‘we’?

These are the questions that the following discussion is concerned with.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hi all-

Just thought I would let people know that if you happen to have undergrads who you think might be well served by an excellent MA program, Georgia State is now accepting applications for acceptance with Fellowships and Scholarships. Our program is well positioned to help those who would like to improve their philosophical skills before applying to Phd programs or those who simply wish to pursue an MA only. We have a large contingent of philosophers working in social, political, and legal philosophy–5 in the Department alone and others in the Poli Sci Dept and Law School.

Please see:

our Departmental website and
Informational PDF.

Via Sally Haslanger:

All professional philosophers are invited to participate in a survey on publishing in philosophy. It should take about 10 minutes. It will be useful to have your CV handy as you fill it out. Please go here to find it.

If all goes well, Sally Haslanger will report on the results at the December APA in a symposium on philosophy publishing (Wednesday 30 December, 11:15-1:15).

Thanks for your help. Please help spread the word.

The Britain and Ireland Association for Political Thought (APT) was formally established on 9 January 2009 at the Oxford Political Thought Conference. A constitution was agreed as were the executive officers, including Professor Richard Bellamy (UCL, Chair), Elizabeth Frazer (New College, Oxford, Treasurer) and Thom Brooks (Newcastle, Secretary). A complete list of all the committee and the text of the constitution is available on the Association Web Site at http://huss.exeter.ac.uk/politics/research/APT/index.php

The decision to create this Association was taken at the previous conference in 2008. Its aim is to promote the study of all branches of political thought.  The study of political thought tends to be dispersed within and across a number of different disciplines - political science, philosophy, history, law, sociology, economics, and cultural and literary studies, amongst others - and to involve a wide variety of approaches. As a result, the distinctive interests and concerns of this subfield risk being lost because so much academic policy focuses on addressing the main branches of the disciplines within which political thought is to be found -  and the fact that political thought often challenges the boundaries of these disciplines makes it even easier to ignore or marginalise. The foundation of the APT is intended to address two main dimensions of this situation:

First, it aims to overcome the tendency for political thought to be marginalised or fall between different disciplines (for example, in the way support for research and graduate study in the field is divided between different research councils in the UK) by providing a mechanism for advocating the concerns of those engaged in political thought to relevant policy makers.

Second, it seeks to facilitate scholarly interaction and collaboration between the whole range of practitioners in the field.

In promoting these dual goals, the Association seeks to:

(a)     Represent the interests of political thought with regard to both teaching and research in relation to the relevant governmental and non-governmental bodies and secure and even advance its place within the Academy

(b)     Act as a facilitator for the research activities of its membership (for example, by, among other activities, setting up a web site and e mail lists to advertise conferences and symposia, alerting members to grant opportunities and helping to link people for grant projects through a register of interests, opening up new publishing outlets for theorists and supporting existing ones through links with publishers and contacts with the main general and specialist journals to which those in the field regularly submit)

(c)     Assist the exchange of ideas on teaching activities e.g. through sharing reading lists via the web site

(d)     Forge connections with related associations in the UK and other countries.

The Association will be formally linked to the January Oxford Political Thought Conference, at which there will be an annual plenary meeting of the Association. All participants at this conference will automatically become members of APT for that year.

Membership costs £10 and is open to any graduate with an active involvement with the political thought community in Britain and Ireland. Requests to join should be sent to Dr Elizabeth Frazer, elizabeth.frazer [at] new.ox.ac.uk

An online library of Tanner lectures is up at the University of Utah.

A new philosophy of science group blog, “It’s Only a Theory,” has started up. Contributors so far include Otavio Bueno (Miami), Craig Callender (UCSD), Gabriele Contessa (Carleton), Roman Frigg (LSE), Marc Lange (UNC), Chris Pincock (Purdue), Stathis Psillos (Athens), Mauricio Suarez (Madrid), and Michael Weisberg (Pennsylvania).

PhilPapers

David Bourget and David Chalmers at ANU have created an online database of philosophy papers called PhilPapers. It allows you to browse through journals, create reading lists at the click of a button, and comment on papers. There is an introduction page here. It looks very likely to become an essential research resource.

Appiah on Obama

Kwame Anthony Appiah has a podcast on the BBC on Barack Obama’s experience teaching constitutional law at Chicago, which you should be able to access via the BBC Documentaries page on iTunes. Nussbaum, Tribe, etc. comment. This link should work too. Six more days.