#philosophy-outreach

#philosophy-outreach

Aesthetic inspiration is social and collective, but aesthetic results are deeply personal. What works for one face, skin type, or bone structure won't always work for another.

In 1976, musician and neuroscientist Manfred Clynes proposed that each emotion is expressed through a precise, biologically programmed dynamic form he called a 'sentic shape.'

Amy Goodman has walked the chemical-dust-clouded streets of Lower Manhattan during the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks, searching for survivors and examining the damage.

"We do not know what thinking is. But we do know when we are not thinking."

The widespread practice of showing the Eid Al Adha slaughtering to children can desensitize them to violence, as many families take pride in this tradition.

The first event is a roundtable on "Zhuangzi: Fate, Desires, Transformation" on April 6th at 9:00am Beijing time.

Attar's 'Conference of the Birds' follows a flock of souls seeking the Simorgh, symbolizing the Divine, through seven valleys, ultimately revealing the Divine as a reflection of the self in relation with others.

A mentor once told me that, when writing a research statement for a professorship, I had to start with the most ambitious pitch I could imagine - and then go ten times bigger. It's tricky enough to do this as a cosmologist, given that the topic of study is the entire Universe. But there is a quest that is more ambitious still: to find out 'what are we doing here?'

Many colleges and universities have made cuts in these programs, often bolstering STEM programs at their expense. It's a situation that has sparked no small amount of impassioned editorials. The headline of a recent article at The Guardian by Alice Speri referenced an 'existential crisis at U.S. universities,' and Speri's reporting features numerous examples of undergraduate and graduate programs facing cuts or outright elimination.

Many philosophers strike me as like Polish apparatchiks in 1983-they turn up to work and do what they did yesterday just because they don't know what else to do, not because they seriously believe in the system they are maintaining. I think it's not been fully appreciated how much of a blow it is to the confidence of the field's youth that scientific ambitions are increasingly abandoned as untenable.

Unlike me, Dan Dennett, or-I suspect-most scientists studying the brain, Richard maintains that science is: i) neutral between the view that consciousness is (to simplify) identical to parts of your brain and what goes on inside of it, and the view that consciousness is a fundamental property of reality, found in all particles of matter (or, for that matter, other theories such as dualism and idealism) and ii) to be sharply distinguished from philosophy.

I have been teaching Introduction to Philosophy at least once a year since 2012, beginning in my second year of graduate school at the CUNY Graduate Center. Teaching in New York City shaped me in countless ways, and each new iteration of "Intro" has pushed me to refine the course-even if only incrementally. The class I teach now at Binghamton University looks very different from the one I first taught as a graduate student using a borrowed syllabus.

This APA Blog series has broadly explored philosophy and technology with a throughline on the influence of technology and AI on well-being. This month's post brings those themes into focus recounting a vital Washington Post Opinion piece by friend of the APA Blog, Samuel Kimbriel. Samuel is the founding director of the Aspen Institute's Philosophy and Society Initiative and Editor at Large for Wisdom of Crowds. We collaborated on a Substack Newsletter about intellectual ambition, building on his essay, Thinking is Risky.