University of Calgary Philosophy Undergraduates!
The Philosophy Department is making substantial changes to its undergraduate program requirements as well as changes to its list of courses. These changes will take effect for the Fall Term of 2009.
New iPhone means on the road blogging. Maybe even more blogging. We’ll see how it goes at the WCPA this weekend.
And what cruel unfeeling deity decided I would be sick for the first week of classes? Let us hope nothing I say fever addled is remembered come next Monday.
… but you are afraid for your soul. What do you do? Here’s a handy flowchart!
From Brundage's Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe
(This went around on the blogosphere last year, but I wanted to tag it here for use in class next term.)
I’ll be speaking as part of a panel at Dragon*Con this year. I don’t have a day or time yet, but the paper title is: “Hustler and Tijuana bibles: desire and objectification in the Watchmen”.
Abstract: When Sally Jupiter shares the Tijuana bible devoted to Silk Spectre with her daughter, Laurie Juspeczyk responds with disgust, rejecting it as sexual objectification. Similar concerns arise in the conflict between the lesbian couple which erupts into violence over the purchasing of Hustler. Vilification of traditional expressions of male sexuality is explicit in the Watchmen; Laurie is clear and forceful, her mother apologetic, telling Laurie only that she can’t understand what it is like to have most of life behind rather than ahead of her. Moralizing male characters also express Laurie’s sentiments, especially Rorschach with his general contempt toward any expression of sexuality. However the 1980s, when the Watchmen appeared, was a time of intense conflict between anti-porn and sex-positive feminists, with the latter arguing that free sexual expression has positive benefits for women. Rarely does the Watchmen present only one side of any issue. In this presentation I trace the appearances of the sex-positive position in the Watchman; finding it perhaps surprisingly in the depiction of Laurie’s own relationships as well as in Sally’s experiences, the interactions of the lesbian couple, and the relationship of Rorschach’s therapist with his wife.
Slides and text to be posted closer to d-day*.
*delivery-day. See how that works?
Grice is dead now!
LMAO
July 29th’s comic continues this very nice summary of the essence of Grice’s theory of implicature. With dinosaurs!
“I don’t know how not to have fun,” he said. “I’m dying and I’m having fun. And I’m going to keep having fun every day I have left.”
If you are the only person on the internet to not see his last lecture at CMU, go remedy that.
Obituary on CNN.
Fall
- 379 Logic II
A formal logic consists of a symbolic language together with a semantics, which captures the possible meanings or truth-conditions of the language, and a deductive system, which aims to capture which inferences are correct. In this course we study the scope and limits of formal logic by examining the relationship between these three parts of a logic. The major results to be presented include soundness (“the deductive system captures only truths”), completeness (“the deductive system captures all the truths”), undecidability (“there is no mechanical procedure for establishing whether or not an argument is valid”), and the Löwenheim-Skolem theorems (which concern some of the limits on the expressive power of first-order logic). Along the way we will study some set theory, recursive functions, Turing-machines, the limits of computation, and (if time permits) second-order logic. The course is fast paced and students are expected to supplement lectures with significant independent study. - 409 Abelard and Heloise: sex, love, and celibacy
The story of Abelard and Heloise is among history’s most famous romances: an illicit love-affair followed by an illegitimate child and a secret marriage, an act of violent revenge by Heloise’s relatives, and then lifelong separation when both entered religious life. This soap-opera worthy story was however underpinned by a deep intellectual relationship. Letters between the lovers both before and after their separation discussed the nature of friendship and love, the duties lovers had to each other, the institution of marriage, conflict between sexual desire and virtue, and the connection between romantic love and the love of God. The course will address these issues as raised in the letters, the Ciceronian discussions of love and friendship that inspired Heloise, various discussions of the nature of love from contempories of the lovers, and Abelard’s own philosophical writings on the nature of friendship. - 595 Honours Seminar
Writing seminar for honours students in their thesis year. - 595 Speech Act Theory
Reading course, closed enrollment.
Winter
- 201 Problems of Philosophy
An introduction to philosophy by means of an examination of questions that arise out of our interactions with the external world and with other people. Questions such as ‘what kind of creatures are we?’, ‘how can I know what the world is like?’, ‘how should groups of people live together?’, etc., are often raised and examined in popular media like books, movies, and television shows, and this course will approach these questions by means of these popular illustrations and then look at the responses of both classical and contemporary philosophers. - 379 Logic II
See the one for fall.
This puts Romeo in a position to notice, and be aroused by, her arousal at being sensed by him. He senses that she senses that he senses her. This is still another level of arousal, for he becomes conscious of his sexuality through his awareness of its effect on her and her awareness that this effect is due to him. Once she takes the same step and senses that he senses her sensing him, it becomes difficult to state, let alone imagine, further iterations, though they may be logically distinct. If they are both alone, they will presumably turn to look at each other directly, and the proceedings will continue on another plane. Nagel, Sexual Perversions
And yes, he does later compare this to Gricean reflexive intentions in communication.
@ARTICLE{Wyatt2007,
author = {Nicole Wyatt},
title = {Pragmatics of empty names},
journal = {Dialogue},
year = {2007},
volume = {46},
pages = {663-81},
abstract = {Fred Adams and collaborators advocate a view on which empty-name sentences semantically encode incomplete propositions, but which can be used to conversationally implicate descriptive propositions. This account has come under criticism recently from Marga Reimer and Anthony Everett. Reimer correctly observes that their account does not pass a natural test for conversational implicatures, namely, that an explanation of our intuitions in terms of implicature should be such that we upon hearing it recognize it to be roughly correct. Everett argues that the implicature view provides an explanation of only some of our intuitions, and is in fact incompatible with others, especially those concerning the modal profile of sentences containing empty names. I offer a pragmatist treatment of empty names based upon the recognition that the Gricean distinction between what is said and what is implicated is not exhaustive, and argue that such a solution avoids both Everett’s and Reimer’s criticisms.}
}
