The Philosophers' Cocoon

New Journal Announcement: Journal of Mexican Philosophy (JMxP)

This is a guest post by Robert Eli Sanchez, Jr. Associate Professor of Philosophy at Occidental College: 

 

We would like to officially announce the launch of the Journal of Mexican Philosophy (JMxP), a peer reviewed journal that aims to make Mexican philosophy available and attractive to an international community of students and scholars. The journal URL is here:

 

https://www.journalofmexicanphilosophy.org/

 

The inaugural issue features original articles by Manuel Vargas (on the philosophy of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz), Amy Oliver (on the value of Mexican philosophy today), and Guillermo Hurtado (on the problem of malinchismo), as well as an original translation of an early work by José Vasconcelos (translated by Clinton Tolley).

 

In addition to diversifying and enriching the history of philosophy, the journal aims to set a model for linguistic inclusivity in mainstream academic philosophy and to cultivate working relationships with philosophers outside the English-speaking world (our journal is bilingual and will include at least one essay by a Mexican colleague in whatever language they prefer to philosophize in). We will also include one translation of Mexican philosophy, giving priority to the contributions of women, indigenous and Afro-Carribean philosophers, and political dissidents. Please check out Volume 1, Number 1 of the journal here! 

Call for papers: Evolutionary ethics: The nuts and bolts approach

I'd like to draw Cocoon readers' attention to this call for papers of a conference I am co-organizing at Oxford Brookes University, 20-21 July 2018.

A growing body of evidence from the sciences suggests that our moral beliefs have an evolutionary basis. To explain how human morality evolved, some philosophers have called for the study of morality to be naturalized, i.e., to explain it in terms of natural causes by looking at its historical and biological origins. The present literature has focused on the link between evolution and moral realism: if our moral beliefs enhance fitness, does this mean they track moral truths? In spite of the growing empirical evidence, these discussions tend to remain high-level: the mere fact that morality is evolved is often deemed enough to decide questions in normative and meta-ethics.

This conference starts from the assumption that the details about the evolution of morality do make a difference, and asks how. We welcome philosophical papers that engage with the sciences, and empirical papers that engage with philosophical themes to naturalize ethics. We are looking for speakers from a wide range of disciplines, including but not limited to, philosophy, developmental and comparative psychology, cognitive anthropology, archaeology, evolutionary biology, and behavioral economics. We are particularly interested in papers that bridge philosophy with one or more of these disciplines.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Evolutionary debunking arguments that engage with the empirical literature
• Companions in guilt arguments
• Modeling the cultural evolution of morality 
• Gene-culture co-evolution of morality 
• Archaeological studies of cooperation and care
• Developmental psychology of morality and its philosophical implications
• The plausibility of historical ethical theories as gauged by the sciences (e.g., Mengzi’s moral sprouts theory, Adam Smith’s theory of moral sentiments)
• Experimental philosophy of morality
• Cross-cultural differences in moral systems

This event is part of the Evolution, ethics, and human origins: A deep-time perspective on human morality project

Plenary speakers: 

• Neil Levy, Oxford Centre for Neuroethics
• Penny Spikins, University of York

Scientific committee: 

• Johan De Smedt, Oxford Brookes University
• Helen De Cruz, Oxford Brookes University
• Emily Burdett, Coventry University
• Richard Rowland, Australian Catholic University  

Call for papers: 

Please place the title of your abstract in the subject line of your e-mail. Submit abstracts in one of the following formats: pdf, rtf, docx, or doc. Do not put the abstracts in the body of the e-mail, but send them as an attachment.   

Abstracts should be on average 500 words (max. 750 words, references do not count towards the word count). They should be prepared for anonymous review.

Please send your abstracts to: [email protected]      

• Deadline for submission: 1 February 2018   
• Notification by 15 March 2018   

We aim to publish papers from the conference as an edited volume. Please indicate in your email if you do not wish your paper to be considered for the volume.

Registration costs £35 and includes lunch for two days and coffee/tea. There is also an optional conference dinner. Click here to register. 

More information on the conference website here. 

The Deviant Philosopher

Odds are you’re close to wrapping up the semester, if you haven’t already. And if you’re anything like me, that means it’s time to start thinking about planning next year’s courses. So I wanted to plug a new resource for making your syllabus more representative: The Deviant Philosopher.

The site has a pair of excellent explainers on both the what and the why of the project, so I recommend you read those. In short, the motivation is to make it easier for instructors to incorporate into their courses material from areas, topics, and figures that are typically left out of philosophy courses, both historical and contemporary. One common excuse for excluding this material is that, because we didn’t study it in school ourselves, we wouldn’t know where to begin, and it would take too much work to get up to speed. So, the group behind The Deviant Philosopher sought out people who do know about this stuff to write modular content that is easy to incorporate into your courses.

The content varies in size and scope, from activities to do as part of a single meeting, to short lesson plans for one or two meetings, to whole units covering weeks of material. There are also primers on various issues (like Confucianism or Care Ethics), to help instructors quickly get up to speed on the topic, figure out which texts to use, etc.

So I’d recommend you check out the site. More importantly, I’d encourage you to contribute! If you know something about an under-appreciated topic in philosophy, and want future philosophy students not to miss out, write something up on it. The project has just launched, and the more ground we can cover, the better!

[Full disclosure, The Deviant Philosopher is organized by my colleagues at the University of Oklahoma, and I’ve contributed a few lesson plans on women ancient philosophers.]

The Philosophy Paperboy

Andrea Raimondi (grad student, Nottingham) has brought my attention to a new website he created, 'The Philosophy Paperboy', which "collects the feeds from all philosophy journals, providing the user with an updated list in real time of all publications at the global level." Andrea also invites any feedback/requests on the beta version, so do check it out!