The Center for Ethics and Public Affairs at the Murphy Institute at Tulane University announces residential Faculty Fellowships for the 2009-2010 academic year.

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From Debra Satz and Rob Reich at Stanford:

The McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society and the Program in Global Justice at Stanford University seek five post-doctoral fellows for 2009-10. We welcome candidates with substantial normative research interests from diverse backgrounds including philosophy, the social sciences, environmental studies, and professional schools.

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The School of Government and International Affairs at Durham is hosting a workshop on “50 Years Since Isaiah Berlin’s Lecture `Two Concepts of Liberty’” on 14-15 November 2008. Speakers include Diana Coole (Birkbeck), George Crowder (Flinders), Katrin Flikschuh (LSE), and Andrew Vincent (Sheffield). Register here.

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:

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We’ll also be holding an Estlund-style reading group on Corey Brettschneider’s Democratic Rights starting in a couple of weeks. More on that in due course. If you’d like to organise a reading group on a book of general interest in political theory/philosophy in 2009, please do not wait for an invitation.

I’ve renewed the site registration for two more years. We now have over 170 full members and 70 participants registered on the site. We’re represented in 20 or so countries around the world. We’ve had over 100 000 page views and we’re approaching 50 000 discrete site visits. For a blog, this is small potatoes. But for an academic blog, it’s not too shabby for the first year. If you’d like to help support the site, you can use the links below to purchase items (not necessarily our members’ books) from Amazon.

Members who would like to initiate any other new projects are very welcome to do so.

I am pleased to announce that Carnegie Mellon University is searching for two tenure track assistant professors. One position is in ethics or political philosophy and the other position is open. Below are links to the job descriptions. Please pass these on to any talented new PhDs or junior assistant professors who might be interested.

http://www.hss.cmu.edu/philosophy/job-ethics.php

http://www.hss.cmu.edu/philosophy/job-open.php

Thanks and all best wishes,

Nicole Hassoun

The journal Representation invites papers for a special issue on Democracy in South Africa, guest edited by Professor Laurence Piper (School of Politics, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.)

South Africa’s transition from the racist oligarchy of apartheid to a non-racial, democratic state based on human rights is widely hailed as one of the ‘miracles’ of recent times. However, due to recent events real concerns have begun to emerge over the robustness of this fourteen year old democracy. These worries arise in part due to the vicious leadership contest within the ANC that has allegedly compromised the independence of key state institutions while presenting an uninspiring choice between an ‘authoritarian Africanist’ and an ‘opportunist populist’. The victorious candidate, Jacob Zuma, is presented respectively as a champion of the left, a trojan horse for Zulu nationalism, or a megalomaniacal populist. The real Zuma remains a mystery. What is more, there is little understanding of what his rise means for democracy in South Africa.

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Other recent special issues include “Virtue and Social Diversity” (2007) and “Cosmopolitanism and the State (2006).

Here is the URL of the journal: http://www.fsu.edu/~philo/STP/index.html.

Public Ethics Radio podcasts interviews with ethicists on different ethical issues in public life. Each program focuses on a particular theme—military intervention, international trade, political corruption—and takes as its starting point some more specific issue that is prominent in the public consciousness. The first program is an interview with Thomas Pogge on the topic of pharmacuetical innovation, and upcoming episodes include interviews with Leif Wenar (on the resource curse), Jessica Wolfendale (on torture), and Larry Temkin (on extending human lifespans)

You can access the podcasts at www.publicethicsradio.org, and they are also available from the website of the Carnegie Council of International Affairs at http://www.cceia.org.

** Sept 1: Thanks to those (half dozen or so) who have sent comments along directly to me.  Very helpful!

Via Jacob T. Levy

The Annual Meeting of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy will be held from 28-29 August, 2008, in conjunction with the American Political Science Association, at the Hynes Convention Center/ Boston Marriott Copley Place/ Sheraton Boston Hotel, in Boston, MA.

Conference schedule below the fold:

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The online application for 2009-2010 faculty fellowships at the Stanford Humanities Center is now available.  Fellows are in residence at the Center during the regular academic year (September to June) and participate in the Center’s intellectual life, sharing ideas and work in progress with a diverse community of scholars from across the spectrum of academic fields and ranks.

Applicants must have a PhD and will normally be at least three years beyond receipt of the degree by the start of the fellowship term.  Fellows are awarded stipends of up to $60,000.  In addition, a housing and moving allowance of up to $15,000 is offered, dependent upon need. External Faculty Fellowships are open to scholars from humanities departments as traditionally defined and to other scholars seriously interested in humanistic issues.

Please visit http://shc.stanford.edu/fellowships/about.htm for complete information, or email or phone: (650) 723-3054

An International Journal of Moral, Political, and Legal Philosophy http://www.brill.nl/jmp

(ISSN 1740-4681)

Volume 5, Number 2 (2008)

EDITORIAL

Thom Brooks, ‘Editorial’, p. 177

ARTICLES

Burke A. Hendrix, ‘Authenticity and Cultural Rights’, pp. 181-203

Igor Primoratz, ‘Patriotism and Morality: Mapping the Terrain’, pp. 204-226

Rex Martin, ‘Two Concepts of Rule Utilitarianism’, pp. 227-255

Jessica Spector, ‘The Grounds of Moral Agency: Locke’s Account of Personal Identity’, pp. 256-281

Paul Weirich, ‘Utility Maximization Generalized’, pp. 282-299

REVIEW ARTICLE

Colin Tyler, ‘Brian Barry and Writings on Social Justice from the Left’, pp. 301-312

BOOK REVIEWS

Jules Holroyd on Personal Autonomy: New Essays on Personal Autonomy and Its Role in Contemporary Moral Philosophy, pp. 313-317

Ben Colburn on Norms of Liberty: A Perfectionist Basis for Non-Perfectionist Politics, pp. 318-321

Adrian Blau on Reflective Democracy, pp. 322-324

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Something of relevance for grad students who also work in ethics or applied ethics:

The graduate students of the Department of Philosophy at Virginia Tech are hosting their fifth annual conference on 7-8 November 2008. The topic of the conference is Twentieth Century Ethics, and the keynote speaker is Simon Blackburn.

Graduate students are invited to submit papers in metaethics, normative ethics, and applied ethics, or on the development of ethics throughout the century. Papers should be no longer than 3500 words (20-30 minutes presentation), and should include a short abstract of 200-250 words. Please prepare them for blind review and email as a MS Word document to Heather Oldham by 1 October 2008. Also include a separate cover sheet with your name, the paper title, your mailing address, email address, telephone number, and institutional affiliation.

Download the full CFP: Human Rights and Justice in Immigration

The Minerva Center for Human Rights at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem is organizing an international conference designed to examine various normative aspects of immigration regimes with an emphasis on the Israeli immigration regime. The conference will examine actual arrangements for immigration in Israel and other countries, and will explore what could be considered desirable universal arrangements for immigration, taking into account the cultural as well as the economic interests of both potential immigrants and their hosts. The conference will be the culmination of the work of an interdisciplinary research group on these issues, which has been working together at the Minerva Center since early 2007.

The conference is scheduled for 25-27 May 2009, and will take place in Jerusalem. Recipients of this Call for Papers are invited to submit proposals to present a paper at the conference. Authors of the selected proposals will be offered flight expenses to Israel and accommodations for the three days of the conference.

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A two-day seminar will be held at the University of Leicester on 25-26 September as part of the ESRC Research Seminar Series. The seminar will cover the three main themes of the series: politics, multiculturalism and media.
A keynote guest public lecture will be given by human rights lawyer Phil Shiner entitled: ‘The UK Torture Team: British Use of Coercive Interrogation Techniques from Northern Ireland to Iraq’.

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The Center for Applied Ethics and Philosophy (CAEP) will host the Third International Applied Ethics Conference on 21-23 November 2008 at Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan. From the CFP:

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