DGPhil Day 2

This actually happened Tuesday, but I didn't get around to posting it then or yesterday. There won't be a Day 3, because I had to work in the morning and I didn't feel like going in just for the business meeting in the afternoon.

I made the plenary on day 2, which was a talk on human rights by Seyla Benhabib from Yale. It was actually very interesting, on how we ground human rights and how they differ from legislative rights. It gave me the impetus to check out some books and learn a bit more about political philosophy, sometime when I have more time...

Following that was a colloquium on ethics, "Angewandte Ethik zwischen Rationalität und Weltanschaaung"
Armin Grünwald from KIT talked about the "Ethizierung" within tech ethics, and noted that the term has become too wide and that too many non-ethicists get places on ethical advisory committees. He was working with a purely descriptive concept of ethics, and didn't agree with a special role for theological ethics. He opined that questions like "are we playing God?" or "is it hubris?" in areas like genetic engineering or climate engineering aren't ethical questions at all. When I challenged this (virtue or character ethics from a normative concept of humanity) he backed off on their nature, but still maintained that the role of ethics is to describe how people think about what is right action / right nature.
Michael Quante from Münster then spent 45 minutes that should have been about medical ethics quoting Wikipedia at us to prove that both "rational" and "worldview" are too imprecise to be poles for a question like this. He also worked with ethics as purely descriptive, and made some pointed comments about paternalism, including the religious kind. In short, this is what happens when you don't have a norm, you can't really say anything and the ethicists struggle to define what they do as separate from sociology.

I had to work in the afternoon, so the only other paper I saw was Dirk Vonfara on the reception of aristotelian Greek thought in Islam and Christianity in the Middle Ages. I think I expected too much out of the paper, because I didn't really learn anything - he only covered Avicenna and Averroes on one side, Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas on the other - but it was well done and highlighted the end relations between revealed and philosophical theology in Islam (think about why the dude got burned!) and the development of theology as a proper scientia in Christianity (though not the tension between theologia and doctrina sacra)

DGPhil Day 1

So here's an overview of what I managed to attend yesterday:
I didn't go to the plenaries, or some of the late sections, because I had some other stuff to do.

I went to a colloquium on "first philosophy", and heard Jonathan Lowe (Durham) explain his four-category ontology, to which I was very sympathetic (I will probably do a separate post on this after the weekend). Johannes Hübner (Halle) responded, and I wasn't so impressed with the response, but I did get straightened out about some of the characteristics of hylomorphism.
Following that Christian Beyer (Göttingen) talked about Husserl and modern epistemology, and I was reminded why I don't read all too much continental philosophy - frankly, I didn't get his point.

In the afternoon sessions, I heard:

Elzbieta Stabryla speak on the moral impulse in literature, and I wasn't too happy with that either. She concluded that all narrative both is and is not moral impetus, which I disliked because of its ambiguity, and because I like the idea of a narrative self, so her theory not only applies to stories read and told, but also to communities and individual moral exemplars.

Julia Peters on McDowell and Loss and Eudaimonia. Julia I've known for a bit, and I knew I would disagree with her, but I must say she is one of the few people with whom I agree on very little but still like personally. There will be an expanded post on her paper later for sure, so I can think about the ideas.

Florian Franken comparing Aristotle and Kant on Eudaimonia. My mother told me that if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all. I will just note that papers like this come from having a textbook culture of learning, because for such a comparison to be interesting, one must simply never have read Aristotle and Kant's original texts extensively (now, that's not to say that there couldn't have been a different, more interesting comparison...)


Today I'm only going to be able to make the plenary in the morning and a colloquium on ethics, because I have to work, so I might even post about today this evening.

DGPhil Conference

Today is the beginning of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Philosophie 's annual conference, this year here at the LMU Munich. I'm not presenting, but I'm going to be attending, so I will report back at at least a little on what I hear.

I skipped the plenary address this morning, because I had to go buy milk, but I'm about to head in for the colloquium "Erste Philosophie heute?"

More, hopefully, to follow.

Ack...

Well, I've managed to not post in over a month. If blogging were a sin, I'd be on my way to sainthood...

Anyway, I've not given up. I took a vacation in Tyrol, and made some progress on the dissertation here (Good side: I'm in the 20th Century! Bad side: that means dealing with the monster chapter on Barth's view of the topic), as well as finishing another course on the philosophy side (I might really make comps around the first of the year).

So now I'm dealing with Barth and Brunner's essays, a couple volumes of the Kirchliche Dogmatik, and Pannenberg's critique of Barth on one side, and trying to get together an analysis of the relationship between being, virtue and the good on the other.

In other projects, I'm going to submit a critique of Craig's Molinism for a Masterclass here in Munich, I'm working on a paper on God and Time (I'm a B-Time guy, I'll post something about that soon), and preparing my paper on virtue and deontological epistemology for the EPS national meeting in November.

Add to that the fact that I've still got to pass my state Greek exam (and have to work in there somewhere too!), and you can see why I don't find much time to blog. But, it's doable.

I'll leave you with a paraphrase of something (and addition to) I heard recently: Keeping your faith when all is lost can be made easier when we do away with hyperbole. All is not lost, only some things aren't how we would like them. Rejecting the temptation of this false "all is wrong" reality allows us to see the reality of our God, who holds us in the palm of His own hand.