A little while ago The Prosblogion posted an interesting play-by-play of an exchange between Alvin Plantinga and Daniel Dennett here. I apologize because I know that this is getting old but I just haven’t had time to post it.

The exchange is interesting for two reasons. First, because it is between two rather seminal thinkers and secondly because it facilitated a rather interesting discussion in the comments section about:

1. The exchange between Plantinga and Dennett

and

2. The discussion of a proposed existence of “bias” against philosophers of religion (or more specifically theistic philosophers).

Quite a few other philosopher bloggers have written about this exchange. Leiter talks about it here, Keith DeRose addresses it here on The Prosblogion, Bill Vallicella here, Chris Pinkcock here and Bradley Monton here.

Edit: I also forgot to add that in the comments section someone posted a link to an mp3 of the whole conversation. It can be found here. The audio quality isn’t the best, but with headphones or loud speakers it’s understandable.

is here

Philadelphia Weekly has included a video here of a quick (very quick) run through detailing how to make homebrew. If you’re interested in learning to brew beer this should give you a feel for how easy it really is.

If you want to go further I’d suggest hitting up your local home brew supply store or checking out “How to Brew” (best if owned, but the online book works well to get started) or Home Brew Talk a great forum filled with VERY helpful people that can help you get started buying and figuring out how to home brew.

All Photos are from my first experience home brewing, which turned out great.

[HT: Joe Sixpack's Blog Beer Radar]

If you’re having trouble reading the small text the full size original is here.

The Consciousness Online virtual conference is up here. Just scanned through it but I’d say it’s defiantly worth a look.

It only took 150 years but according to the Times Online the Catholic church has fully embraced Darwinism, here. If this wasn’t enough members of the Church are proposing to ban Intelligent Design from an up coming conference as “poor theology and poor science”. This is great news for science and great news for the Catholic Church. Now if we could only get the Evangelicals to embrace the theory of evolution here in the U.S.

…you come to us today on your bicycles after buying Girl Scout cookies and helping out Mother Teresa, telling us “We’re sorry, we didn’t mean it. We won’t do it again. Trust us”, well I have some people in my constituency that actually robbed some of your banks and they say the same thing.

-Rep. Michael Capuano giving the CEO’s of Wall Street’s banks hell.

Full Video here:

In my last post I gave my reasons for my not wanting to go straight into graduate school upon completing my undergraduate degree. Bill Vallicella has given me even more reason to stick to this plan of action. Over at his blog Maverick Philosopher, Bill Vallicella wrote two posts here and here chronicling his experience with the job market in philosophy and his thoughts about the worth of Ph.D. in philosophy in the job market. His assessment is sobering.

In the second post about the subject a reader asked him:

How could one make a living in philosophy and the humanities besides being a professor?

He answers:

The short answer to the second question is that one can’t……You might spend five or six years earning a doctorate only to end up teaching ten courses a year at slave wages as an adjunct professor in a community college in Fargo, North Dakota or Hibbing, Minnesota, or some such place. (I’m sure these places have their compensations, so please no irate e-mail.) Only slightly better would be the life of the gypsy scholar who after a string of one-year full-time appointments spread out over these United States ends up in Beirut or Ankara. To add insult to injury, you might find that your marginally intelligent colleagues at the community college have terminal Masters degrees, have never published a word, care not a whit about their subject except for moneymaking purposes, but get a substantial regular salary with benefits, while you with your doctorate and lengthy publication record must subsist on the crumbs from their table.

I love philosophy. Probably more than anything else I’ve ever done in my life. I can’t think of anything else I’d rather spend my time doing (brewing beer comes to mind as the only alternative). But faced with the true nature of the job market I’d say that I’m more and more inclined to give up hope of teaching and research as a full time job and begin to look for other career options. Again I’d still like to get my masters and possibly a Ph.D but this type of torture at the end of the process hardly seems worth it for a job that isn’t guaranteed.

Over at the Chronicle of Higher Education Thomas Benton (a.k.a. William Pannapacker) writes that

It’s hard to tell young people that universities view their idealism and energy as an exploitable resource

As I’ve been considering graduate school I’ve found this article to be a great help in deciding against going. It’s been a thought in my mind for quite some time and at present I think it might be best for me to consider entering the work force (though with the economy the way it is this prospect is also bleak). I suppose I will still either audit courses or enroll as a non-matriculated student at a local program, but for now going to graduate school full time will not be on the menu.

Part of the decision was based upon the size of my undergraduate loans (which are not small to say the least) and part of this decision to not go is based upon the bleak situation in humanities higher education jobs, which I assume will only get worse with time. It’s sad that for many years I was sold a proverbial pipe dream (one that involved teaching and research at the end of the tunnel).

I now realize there is no end of the tunnel for most grad-students, only disappointment and defeat (I have read TONS of articles chronicling Ph.D. success rates..etc). I do not wish to be 30+ years old with as much education as a medical doctor and make $30,000-$40,000 a year.

I’d still love to get my masters degree or even a Ph.D. and I would still love to teach/research, but I think it’s going to be best to take some time off to learn to work in the real world and develop a skill now just in case there is nothing for me when I graduate.

The 86th Philosophers Carnival is here. This one is worth checking out, the comics coupled with it are definitely fun.

I also wanted to bring PhilPapers to the attention of my readers. If you don’t know this is a great resource for finding philosophy papers online, including thousands of links to full text articles. This is a great resource.

Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal is a masterpiece of a movie. If you have a Netflix subscription or some other way to get your hands on this movie I would really suggest it. This scene is probably one of the most powerful in the movie.

The Knight has just entered into a church to pray and begins to pour out his doubts about God, life and death to “Death”, who the knight has mistaken for a priest.

Here

From the article:

Authorities in northern Cyprus believe they have found an ancient version of the Bible written in Syriac, a dialect of the native language of Jesus.

The manuscript was found in a police raid on suspected antiquity smugglers. Turkish Cypriot police testified in a court hearing they believe the manuscript could be about 2,000 years old.

Police say it could be about 2,000 years old? This is probably an example of journalistic hype. It happens all the time in science articles, why not in articles about the bible.

Experts were however divided over the provenance of the manuscript, and whether it was an original, which would render it priceless, or a fake.

Let’s use some common sense to think about this. For this book to be 2,000 years old and it would have to predate the writing of the Gospels (according to our modern dating methods) and almost all know Bible fragments (fragments mind you, nothing original).

I’m going to call foul play and shenanigans on the paper for quoting the police as “experts”. It still might pan out to be real but for now file this under fake but interesting.

I’ve was out of the blogging scene during break so I’m hoping to get back into the swing of things. I plan on getting back up with some new posts I’ve been working on and some other updates. It’s gearing up to be a busy semester so I hope this blog doesn’t suffer the neglect in the mean time.

In other news a paper I wrote has been accepted to be presented to an undergraduate philosophy conference here. I’ll be presenting it on March 1 and I might also be giving comments on a paper (the coordinator said he would get back to me soon about that). As it’s the first time I’ve ever done anything like this I’m very excited to be participating and I hope that I will be able to do this sort of thing in the future.

I just got back from the meeting at APA East put on by the Metanexus Institute. From what I understand Metanexus is mainly supported by a grant from the Templeton Foundation and they exist to bridge the gap between science and religion. On their website they say:

“Our key interests include the development of rigorous transdisciplinary methodologies, the question of the possibility of the unity of knowledge, the constructive engagement of science and religion, the quest for wholeness, and ultimately the transformation of the university to restore the pursuit of wisdom to the center of its mission.”

The subject matter for the meeting was “Self and Free Wili”. The first speaker at meeting was Stewart Goetz from Ursinus College. I was familiar with him because I came across a paper written by him in the collection of essays called Soul, Body, and Survival. He is a substance dualist and attempted to argue for the coherence of dualism (coherent in that it is a “just so” story). He had two basic points that he tried to make in his talk:
1) Substance dualism is an intuitively basic belief (he called it “Common Sense” belief)

This claim seemed to me to be untrue. I would think that a categorically basic belief about one’s self would be that they are their brain or even more basically their body. It takes quite a bit of reflection to make yourself believe that what you are, is not what you see when you look in the mirror but it is something beyond that, that is immaterial.

2) It is conceivable that a neuro-scientist could function as a reductionist at her job and personally believe in dualism

While this seems possible it does not seem to help his case. If a neuro-scientist functioned as a reductionist at their lab, why would they need to postulate the existence of a soul? The main reason I reject a soul is because I can’t think of anything that can be predicated of a soul that is not accounted for in a physicist concept of the mind (in fact Goetz said something to the effect that he believed there would never be anything of the sort ever found).

The question I have with this is how can it be that if A has all the same predicates as thing B, and they (A and B) exist in a causally connected manner to the point where a change in A will result in a similar change in B, then how can we claim that A does not equal B? It seems to me that if all predicates in A and B are the same then they are necessarily the same thing. Hence, since no predicate can be given to the soul, we assume that all it’s attributes are in step with the physical mind to the point where the mind is the “soul”. Why then postulate the existence of the soul?

The other speaker was Nancey Murphy who I enjoyed quite a bit. I’ll blog about her presentation in a post tomorrow.