Lindenthal-Institut
in cooperation with the publisher Ontos Verlag announces an international
colloquium on the theme “New Scholastic Meets Analytic Philosophy,” to be held
in Cologne, Germany on December 7 - 8, 2013.
The invited speakers are E. J. Lowe, Uwe Meixner, David S. Oderberg,
Edmund Runggaldier, Erwin Tegtmeier, and Edward Feser. Details can be found here.
Nice. Good team of speakers, but do you have any tips of who is this Edward Feser guy anyway? What a strange name!
ReplyDeleteSet Feser on stunning....
DeleteWill this be a German language seminar? Also, is Feser pronounced "PHAY-zair"?
ReplyDeleteYep, to the above comment.
ReplyDeleteClose -- it's like "phaser" from Star Trek.
ReplyDeleteThe colloquium will in in English.
Where is the "Like" button? :-) Dr. Feser are you on facebook? Your material seriously need to be shared.
ReplyDelete~ Mark
So, will we be seeing the rise of Gnu Scholasticism? Also, will any part of the colloquium be recorded?
ReplyDeleteAs one of the orginazers I would like to answer the question of traumerei: The colloquium is in English only.
ReplyDeleteEd,
ReplyDeleteI'd second the suggestion to get yourself on Facebook. And, for that matter, Twitter.
I can imagine you loathing to do either of these things, since it's already hectic enough to deal with this place, and both Twitter and Facebook can be uh... cesspools, for lack of a better word. Still, they're great ways to raise the visibility of your work. I believe it's fairly easy to set up a blog to automatically post to Twitter and/or FB whenever you enter a post.
And really, your book and writings deserve wider circulation. You communicate well to the laypeople (like myself), and deliver concepts that are of considerable importance. I'd like to see far, far more people become aware of what you write about.
Just throwing my two cents in here.
“Close -- it's like "phaser" from Star Trek.”
ReplyDeleteSo from here on out, when we discuss the tone you take in your polemical work, should contrast “Feser set to kill” with “Feser set to stun”?
Cologne better have their "Feser set to fun"
ReplyDeleteI third the facebook and twitter suggestion!
ReplyDeleteNOTE: I deleted my above comment because I didn't understand I had to wrap a URL in HTML tags.
ReplyDeleteI think the phaser example is used just as often as the triangle example!
Ed, if you're thinking of the Facebook option to increase visibility, you can synchronise blog posts here with a fan page on Facebook. This might be a handy guide.
I should add, I haven't much experience with Facebook fan pages, though. Furthermore, if you don't already know, Facebook can be a massive black hole which will suck away time.
I wouldn't bother with Twitter because Facebook makes it redundant, the 140 character limit is utterly useless for communicating non-trivial ideas sufficiently and it has a smaller user base.
I wouldn't bother with Twitter because Facebook makes it redundant, the 140 character limit is utterly useless for communicating non-trivial ideas sufficiently and it has a smaller user base.
ReplyDeleteIt's fantastic for sending out notifications of updates/links, fast comments, and rapid communication at least. Sure it has a smaller userbase, but also a significant number - and it's not like there's a 1:1 overlap between the two. A lot of people are far more likely to look for news or information of sites-of-interest on twitter rather than Facebook.
Plus, twitter's trivial to maintain a presence on.
Hello Dr Feser,
ReplyDeleteFirst of all: thank for your excellent work - it has been truly influential to my own philosophical development.
My real reason for this is that I was hoping that you could comment on the following article: New Caledonian crows reason about hidden causal agents by Alex Taylor, Rachael Miller, and Russell Gray.
How problematic is this for the Aristotelian understanding of man's animal soul as distinctively rational? I would greatly appreciate your comment or anyone else's from a Thomist perspective.
Thanks in anticipation.
Hello again,
ReplyDeleteForgot to include the link to the aformentioned article:
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/09/10/1208724109.full.pdf+html
Anonymous
ReplyDeleteTo help out your wild crow study is HERE
Definitely agree with the commenters encouraging you to make your presence felt on Facebook, Ed. Your work is what got me interested in Thomism in the first place. People need to be exposed to it, and Facebook (though it has it's flaws) can definitely get you exposure. Keep up the good work.
ReplyDeleteI would argue that anal-ytic, or rather anal-retentive philosophy, is essentially reductionist. And that it is an extension of, and shares the same presumptions about what we are as human beings, and thus of the nature of Reality altogether, as do atheists or the advocates of scientific materialism.
ReplyDeleteThe basic method of such philosophy is to objectify whatever it is that is being considered. Just as conventional scientists objectify whatever it is that they are researching. By doing so such philosophy actually eliminates most of what we are at the deep subjective levels of our being-existence, from its method, and thus of its results.
By doing so it thus eliminates even the possibility of any kind of change occurring in the psyche and consciousness of the person that does it.
Such a change in consciousness is what the purpose of doing philosophy as a transformation of the subjective "knower" was once upon a time understood to be - and practiced as such.
Philosophy as an open-ended Process without any a-priori presumptions about anything. Including, in the case of this essay by Edward that by studying the long-ago-dead "Scholastics" anyone can come to some kind of understanding about the nature of Reality. Or that the "Scholastics" had some kind of superior wisdom into what we are as human beings, and thus of the nature of Reality altogether.
A means of contemplating at the feeling depth level (prior to the exercise of the left-brained verbal mind) whatever is being examined. Contemplation as practiced by Plotinus, to the degree that one spontaneously enters into a state of contemplative ecstasy. William Blake used to practice such a "method" too - by gazing into his fire place.
What is more, just like the method used by conventional scientists analytical philosophy is (mis)informed by a fundamental doubt of the Living Divine Reality, and thus by extension, of the intrinsic fullness of our being-existence.
Such doubt inevitably registers itself all over the body-mind-complex of the philosopher. And indeed all of us in our usual dreadful sanity, because a fundamental doubt of the fullness of our eixtence-being (mis)informs our entire culture.
Doubt is inevitably and instantaneously causative of fear, sorrow and anger too.
The "frozen" head or the point of contraction at the crown of the head, not given over to Divine Communion is the origin of the ego's fear.
The contraction at the brain core, or the Ajna Door, is the origin of the ego's sorrow.
The contraction at the throat, in its depth, is the origin of the ego's anger.
Anonymous,
ReplyDeleteDoubt is inevitably and instantaneously causative of fear, sorrow and anger too.
There's no reason, then, to give you the benefit of the doubt--is there?
Crude: Twitter and Facebook can be uh... cesspools, for lack of a better word. Still, they're great ways to raise the visibility of your work.
ReplyDeleteBut folks would still need to be pointed Ed's way in the first place, so why not just point them here? I absolutely agree about the need to spread the word, though, so maybe everyone who's already on Twit/Face should start linking to the Profeser's posts. The general population is never going to turn into A-T philosophers, but there is a lot of nonsense taken for granted in the modern zeitgeist that couldn't gain such a foothold if people were at least vaguely aware of traditional philosophical ideas, or even just that those ideas are out there as serious, viable, perennial thought.
Is Thomism going through an identity crisis all of a sudden? Analytic philosophy was called even by Jean-Luc Marion as "inherently atheistic". Why bother trying to reconcile logicism and all the analytic jargon with the traditional teachings of St Thomas? Its easy to misjudge something a priori, but I hope this does some fairness to the actual historical Thomists rather than just give a non-hermeneutical interpretation of St Thomas (thus ignoring the other great commentators who had nothing to do with analytic philosophy). I know the analytic school is nice and trendy, but Thomism never really has been about reconciling or attempting to reconcile movements within itself. Cajetan never tried to call his philosophy a Humanistic Thomism! Thoughts?
ReplyDeletePerhaps, Ferraiuolo, that emotivism and phenomenology are having an identity crisis? Why bother trying to reconcile emotivism and all the arbitrary, subjectivistic jargon with your personal interpretations of the world - as it is all the more easy to misjudge your emotions, and make an idol out of yourself. No, I'm afraid, it is immanentism that is having an identity crisis - indeed - it never had any *real* identity in the first place.
ReplyDelete