Laughing at Life

Imagine watching me standing alone in a corner of a crowded airport café, a folded newspaper in one hand and a pen in the other. I start to laugh (perhaps through clenched teeth) as I contemplate a move I can't make on the sudoku I'm attempting to complete. And suppose you learn that I wasn't waiting for a plane's departure or arrival, and I'm not using the café for the things that cafés serve, nor am I there to meet anyone. You might think there's something odd about someone going to an airport just to find somewhere to stand to laugh at a sudoku that they're completing, particularly since sudokus don't seem like the kinds of things that can be funny.

I think sudokus can be funny (or perhaps less trivially: that laughter can be an appropriate response to a sudoku). In fact, I think there's quite a lot to laugh at with sudokus in general, and I've encountered some particular puzzles which have a comedic content in a very similar way to how cryptic crosswords involve a groan-inducing element, if not out-and-out gags, but I'll save that for another occasion. Even more generally, I think laughter is an appropriate response to someone who goes out of their way to do something so seemingly pointless as to stand unnecessarily in a crowded airport café, laughing at a very disposable and unmomentous number-based logical puzzle.

In 'Absurdity, Incongruity and Laughter' (Philosophy, 84: 111-134, Jan 2009), Bob Plant argues that laughter is an appropriate response to a slightly different type of absurdity. Albert Camus (and some other existentialists) maintained that there is something absurd about life - that our lives are caught up in a rather ridiculous situation, in which we are committed to repeating the pathetic (because futile) attempt to find meaning and reason for our existence. Plant thinks that if this is the case, we should probably just laugh.

Friday Question: On the Evidential Argument from Evil

Some philosophers of religion defend a version of the Evidential Argument from Evil known as the Direct Argument. The argument goes as follows:

(1) If there were a God, there would be no gratuitous evils (GEs)
(2) It is probable that at least one of the evils in our world is a GE.
(3) Therefore: probably, there is no God.

Firstly, regarding GEs: A given evil is a gratuitious evil (GE) if it is such that God would have no adequate justifying reason for permitting it (e.g. there is no sufficiently outweighing good that could not have been brought about without permitting a particular evil). [For more on gratuitous evil, see here].

In support of premise (2), William Rowe has suggested that mere reflection on some of the more heinous forms of evil in our world ought to convince us that it is probable that at least one of the evils in our world is a GE. As Murray and Rea suggest, "It seems simply obvious when we consider cases like [<Warning: distressing picture> a deer dying an agonizing, slow death in a forest fire] that there is no greater good to which we might appeal that could justify it." (Murray and Rea 2008: 167). Stephen Wykstra calls these kind of arguments "Noseeum Arguments": when considering certain cases like that of the deer, we look long and hard for some possible greater good, and yet we come up empty handed; put simply: we can't see any possible greater good, so it's probably not there.

As Murray and Rea point out, two conditions have to be met for a Noseeum inference to be a good one. Firstly, you have to be looking for the thing in question in the right place. Secondly, it must be the case that you would see the thing in question if it were really there. A Noseeum inference is a poor one if either of these conditions isn't met. After all, your inference that there is no milk in the refrigerator is no good if either (i) you would know milk if you saw it but looked in the wrong place for it (say, the garage), or, (ii) you looked in the right place for it (the fridge) but wouldn't know it if you saw it (say, you think milk looks like something much different than it does). Skeptical theists object to Noseeum arguments in defence of (2) of the Direct Argument, and this is because they think we are not well positioned when it comes to identifying assessing the reasons God might have for permitting evil. Their main contentions here are that, given the finitude of our human cognitive and moral faculties, it seems that there are many types of good with which we are not familiar, and further, that even if we were acquainted with the relevant goods, there is doubt that we would adequately comprehend the role these evils might play in bringing about those goods. (Murray & Rea 169.) Rowe responds to Skeptical Theists on this point by suggesting that, a problematic implication of their position is that we we must admit that no matter how much evil there might be in the world (and no matter how terrible it seems) we would never be in a position to accept (2): that it is probable that at least one of the evils in the world is a GE. Rowe also suggests that, in reply to the Skeptical Theists, it's not just that we looked and we can't see reasons that might justify God in permitting certain heinous evils (i.e. the deer's agonizing death), but that we can't even conceive of what such reasons would be. What do you think of Rowe's replies to the Skeptical Theist at this juncture? How might the Skeptical Theist reply?

Is New Atheism philosophically interesting?

Often they stare unblinking, with clear frustration and disdain piercing through their expressions; “What do you mean you don’t care if God exists or not?”, and I sit back filled with a sense of dread as I await another impassioned onslaught, usually incorporating talk of Darwinism, feminism, terrorism and gay rights and often concluding with a rather hasty ultimatum along these lines:  “You are either on the side of oppression, segregation and superstition or freedom, liberty and truth.”  And so I am presented again with the rather trite fork in the road of too many discussions in and around campus with the ‘enlightened’ amongst the Theism/Atheism debate.  Everything seems to be presented in such black and white terms; no doubt this is fuelled by a media culture of sound bites and headlines, propped up by massive book sales as it quite literally rages across forums, social media and YouTube. 

I can vicariously feel my interlocutor’s sense of certainty as he berates me, after all I remember as a young teenager being convinced that my lack of belief formed some important aspect of my identity; I even had some sense of affinity with the rather sweeping claim that ‘religion poisons everything’, to quote the late Hitchens.  Growing up surrounded by religious fundamentalism on both sides in Northern Ireland it was not hard to find the fuel for my resentment.  Over the past number of years however I have come to increasingly associate this New Atheist (NA) movement with fundamentalism, and I want to focus on one aspect in particular which contributes to my finding NA so unsatisfying.

“I do not believe in God”; what are we left with after the negation?  I get the sense both Fundamentalism and NA privilege the epistemological status of belief (or unbelief) over the cultural and political presence of religion; we are told repeatedly by those of the NA camp that belief in God is unjustified, ridiculous and dangerous but for me these claims ring hollow.  It is most often the absolute nature of their statements which I have picked up as a defining feature of this style of discourse and it is ultimately this characteristic which fills me with an acute sense of disillusionment. 

 For both the NAs and religious fundamentalists, religion is at times equated with correct propositional belief (what Dawkins calls the 'God hypothesis' – 'the existence of God is a scientific hypothesis like any other').  William Stahl argues that both new atheists and religious fundamentalists suffer from what Richard Bernstein has called 'Cartesian Anxiety'; this is to be understood as the need for certainty and authority (whether from inerrant text validated by science or from infallible reason validated by science). Steve Fuller argues that both groups depend on a geometrical epistemology wherein the first principles are guaranteed and deductions can be made from them.  In this epistemology the empirical is fused with normative value.  New atheists deduce from atheistic evolution and make social and moral claims on this basis, whereas fundamentalists deduce morals from an inerrant sacred text.  Both view belief as authoritative in that belief establishes what is normative and in doing so downplay the influence or authority of tradition, community or experience.

This focus on some cognitive state of belief/unbelief seems to me to be greatly overstated to the detriment of the great political, moral and cultural questions which face post-enlightenment atheists.  Religion involves community, rituals, moral teaching all of which has contributed to the formation of our cultures worldwide, and if we are to accept that the metaphysical commitments underpinning these belief systems have rotted away, which I do, then there seem to be far more important and interesting problems to deal with than the NA movement has the stomach for. 

When Nietzsche had his madman proclaim the Death of God he has him run into a crowded market place holding a lantern on a bright morning crying out, “I’m looking for God!” before proclaiming: “We have killed him – you and I!”  Instead of an exuberant victory dance, or running home to write a best-selling (and Hume ignoring) treatise on how morality can be securely founded on science, the madman instead announces this event with a great sense of gravity and foreboding:

“Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?... How can we console ourselves, the murderers of all murderers!  The holiest and mightiest thing the world has ever possessed has bled to death under our knives; who will wipe this blood from us?... Is the magnitude of this deed not too great for us?  Do we not ourselves have to become gods merely to appear worthy of it? ...it has not yet reached the ears of men.” (The Gay Science §125)

There is a certain irony here in that we are told many of those who heard the madman’s cries were atheists, and they simply laughed at him.  I just can’t help but wonder if others out there share my contention that there is certain shallowness to the current state of the debate, a shallowness I have suggested may rest on some latent philosophical presuppositions made by those who carry it out in the public eye.  I appear to be far more pessimistic about what a mere negation of a belief can hope to accomplish.           

Royal Institute of Philosophy Public Lecture

This Thursday (the 23rd) at 3.30pm Dr Alison Hills, a leading moral philosopher from Oxford University, will be giving a talk entitled “Cognitivism About Moral Judgement” in the Conference Room (20.103), here in the School of Politics, International Studies and Philosophy.

This event, which is part of the Royal Institute of Philosophy Public Lecture series, is open to everyone, and undergraduate and graduate students are particularly welcome to attend.

A Puzzle About Compensation

Duties of rectification are a familiar part of practical reasoning. Both as a matter of law and morality, it seems only right and proper that wrongdoers ought to try to set matters straight by providing full and adequate reparation. But what qualifies as full and adequate reparation? Accepting for the sake of argument that there are duties of rectification, what counts as fulfilling them?

One approach to this question appeals to the Counterfactual Test. This holds that the duty of rectification is a duty to establish the situation that would have obtained had the initial wrong not taken place. On this view, if I wrong you with the result that you end up on n units of utility, but you would have ended up on n+1 units of utility had I not wronged you, then I fully discharge my duty of rectification if I bring your utility-level up from n to n+1.

However, this account of what it means to provide “full and adequate reparation” encounters a curious problem in cases where a wrongful injury is followed by an unexpected benefit. Suppose, for example, that I wilfully damage your car, with the result that you miss your flight to America, but it so happens that the flight in question crashes into the Atlantic, with the loss of life of everyone on board. The Counterfactual Test implies that I fully rectify the wrong by bringing about the situation that would have obtained had I not damaged your car, which in this instance involves your dying in a plane crash. But clearly this is absurd: rectifying my wrong can’t involve my killing you.

I therefore wonder whether there is a way of characterizing “full and adequate reparation” which is plausible in its own right and which handles cases of “unexpected benefit” in a satisfactory way. One option, of course, is to insist that, in the plane crash case, no wrong has been committed and no duty of rectification has been incurred. Another option is to tweak the Counterfactual Test so that the relevant point of comparison isn’t the (near) possible world where you die in the plane crash but the (more distant) possible world in which you catch the flight and cross the Atlantic safely. But can either of these options be made to work? Or should we search for a different strategy for thinking about rectification that does away with counterfactual reasoning altogether? What do readers think?

Annual Spring Conference of the IPS: Philosophy in Ireland

CFP:

Annual Spring Conference of the IPS:

"Philosophy in Ireland: Past actualities – present challenges – future potentialities?"

(22^nd – 24^th June 2012)

This year marks the 50^th Anniversary of the Irish Philosophical Society. In order to celebrate this anniversary, the theme of this year’s IPS spring conference will be devoted to ‘Philosophy in Ireland: Past Actualities, Present Challenges, and Future Potentialities’.

It will take place from the 22^nd to 24^th June 2012, at the National University of Ireland / St. Patricks’ College, Maynooth.

Papers that shed light on the contribution of philosophy and, more broadly, of Irish thought, to ethical, spiritual, and political choices in the Irish past are invited. Papers discussing current developments in Irish philosophy, including the work of influential contemporary Irish philosophers and Irish writers of strong philosophical interest, are welcome. Finally, papers which are concerned with possible future developments in Irish philosophy, in particular in ethics and its contribution to social life, aesthetics, metaphysics and the philosophy of language are also invited.

The aim of the conference is not only to celebrate and show how Irish philosophers have in the past influenced philosophical movements and the connections to the present but also to explore links between philosophy and art, especially literature, in which Irish writers have made such a strong contribution internationally, as well as the connection between Ireland and major philosophical thinkers such as Wittgenstein. Postgraduate students are particularly encouraged to submit papers for a special postgraduate research session.

Topics of interest for this Conference include, but are not limited to the following:

1.     History of Irish Philosophy and Irish Thought:

§       The Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena, Richard FitzRalph, and Peter of Ireland

§       Observation of Nature and Irish Thought: Robert Boyle

§       Irish Enlightenment and its counter movements: John Toland, Edmund Burke, and George Berkeley

§       Wittgenstein in Ireland

2.     Contemporary Developments in Irish Philosophy and in Irish Thought:

§       The Philosophy of William Desmond, Richard Kearney

§       General developments in fields of ethics, metaphysics, philosophy of language

§       Philosophy and literature (Beckett and Existentialism, Joyce and Deconstruction, Heaney and Heidegger)

§       Philosophy and Film (Neil Jordan; …)

§       Philosophical traditions in Ireland (phenomenology, analytic…)

The sessions on individual topics will be followed by a Round Table Discussion on Sunday (24^th June), addressing questions pertaining to the present state and challenges of philosophy in Ireland as well as possible contributions not only to philosophical scholarship but also to the wider sense of engaging with current issues and future challenges by contributing to new visions needed to respond to what President Michael D. Higgins has called the “intellectual crisis in society”.

---

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:

Prof. David Berman, Trinity College Dublin

Prof. William Desmond, Catholic University Leuven

A detailed schedule will follow in due course, after selection process for received abstracts has been completed.

---

Abstracts & Selection Criteria

Authors are invited to send abstracts (maximum 1 page) of their papers (approximately 30 minutes presentation time, 20 minutes for postgraduates) on topics indicated above, or on themes of their own choosing relevant to the Conference’s topic.

The Editorial Board welcome abstracts from academics in the relevant disciplines and departments as well as independent researchers working on topics relevant to the conference.

Schedule for Submissions:

-       Abstracts: One page (c. 600 words maximum) and CVs (maximum of 2 pages,

 including any personal statement and/or listing of publications) to be received by 6^th April 2012.

-       Abstracts to be short-listed by the Editorial Board and papers invited by 30th April 2012.

Please send abstracts (and any queries) to Conference Co-ordinators:

Susan Gottlöber, Philosophy Department, National University of Ireland Maynooth

Email: demitras@gmail.com 

Cyril McDonnell, Philosophy Department, National University of Ireland Maynooth

Email: cyril.mcdonnell@nuim.ie 

---

Cost & Accommodation

Registration Cost: 25 EUR

Concession (Student, Senior): 15 EUR

IPS Member: 15 EUR

There is reasonably priced On-Campus Accommodation available; we would strongly advise that you book early. See: http://www.maynoothcampus.com/accommodation.php

All speakers and participants at the Round Table Discussion are invited to the Conference Dinner on Sat, June 23^rd 2012.

---

Publication of Proceedings:

Within 12 months of the event, a special edition of the Yearbook of the Irish Philosophical Society will be published, according to normal academic process of double-blind peer review, comprising selected papers presented at the conference and/ or received.

---

--
Rev. Dr Gavan Jennings
Hon. Sec. IPS
t: 353 (0)1 6767 420
m: 086 065 2313info@irishphilosophicalsociety.ie
gavanjennings@gmail.com

The Irish Philosophical Society
Cumann Fealsúnachta na hÉireann

Blog: New Spring Semester Schedule

Greetings, I'm happy to announce a new, even more active blog schedule for Spring 2012. The schedule will be as follows:

Mondays: Post by a QUB Philosophy staff member.

Wednesdays: Post by a member of the QUB Philosophy Society

Fridays: Friday Question (Sometimes this will be written by a staff member, sometimes by a student from Dr. Jarvis's Human Nature module.

I want to thank Patrick Campbell for his work in helping to organize the Wednesday slot and Dr. Jarvis for taking the initiative with his class for various Friday Questions.

In the near future, we can expect Monday staff posts from Dr. Morrison, Dr. Watkins, Dr. Kerr, and Dr. Blease.

Additionally, as was updated earlier, there will be more Philosophy news posted here as well as information about local events (conferences, workshops, etc.).

Looking forward to a great semester of philosophical blogging, Dr. Carter

Relations and Explanations

In our everyday explanations of someone's behavior, we often make reference to the person's beliefs and desires. We say that he went to the movies because he believed that he was meeting his friends or because he wanted to see an action flick. These explanations make it seem as if beliefs and desires are states of a person's mind that drive them towards engaging in certain kinds of activities.

One of the odd (and intriguing) features about beliefs and desires, however, is that having them seems to be partly a matter of having certain relational properties. For instance, a person's believing that Obama is the president of the US depends on their standing in the right kind of relationship to Obama. This is not a relationship that Julius Caesar stood in with respect to Obama; Julius Caesar could not have beliefs about Obama in the way that we can.

However, once we realize that having beliefs and desires involves having these relational properties, it is not clear why they should be important in explaining behavior. Relational properties are, in many instances, not very interesting for these kinds of explanatory purposes. For instance, it can appear bizarre, upon reflection, why standing in certain relations with the stars should make any difference to a person's earthly behavior, activities, encounters, situations, etc. That's at least part of what's strange about the suggestions of astrologists.

Consequently, there is a serious question as to whether beliefs and desires are themselves explanatory, or, for instance, whether having beliefs and desires merely entails that one is in other states that explain behavior. Thoughts?

Friday question: The possibility of an eternally created universe

In his highly popular book, A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking describes a model of the universe wherein the universe is finite though without a beginning. He then goes on to infer that from the lack of beginning for the universe there is no need for a creator. His inference here appears to be based on the assumption that we infer a cause for something if that thing has a beginning, but if the thing does not have a beginning we do not infer a cause thereof: whatever has no beginning has no cause.

This serves to locate Hawking in the medieval discussion of whether or not there could have been an eternally created universe (though I’m sure Hawking doesn’t realise it!). Many thought the idea of an eternally created universe was impossible, for, following the same line of thought as Hawking, many reasoned that if there were no beginning for the universe, then there is no need for a cause and thus no need for a creator. As with most philosophical issues, Aquinas thought a little deeper on the matter.

Aquinas reasoned that there is a distinction between the following claims: (i) x began to be and (ii) x was caused to be. He argued that (i) and (ii) are not identical yet for the most part they are simultaneous. (i) points out that there is a temporal dimension to a thing’s being whereas (ii) points out that a thing is dependent on another for its being. Now, it does not seem clear that every instance of (ii), i.e. every instance of a thing’s being caused to be requires an instance of (i), i.e. that thing’s beginning to be. For example, imagine that the sun and the moon are both eternal and thus neither began to be. Now, the moon is illuminated by the light of the sun, in which case the illumination of the moon is caused by the sun, in which case the moon depends for its illumination on the sun. However, given that ex hypothesi sun and moon are eternal and therefore never began to be, the illumination of the moon did not begin to be. Consequently, we here have a case of (ii) without (i), that is, something’s being caused to be without its having a beginning.

Now, Thomas argues that the case is the same with the universe. We can know one way or the other that the universe is caused to be if it displays any characteristic that it cannot account for of itself, in which case it will be dependent on another. We can know that the universe began to be if we can show that at some distant time in the past it had a beginning. Thomas rejected all the arguments purporting to show the beginning of the universe as successful (today it might be said that we have better arguments), but this did not mean that he thought the universe to be uncreated, for he argued that insofar as everything in the universe exists but not essentially, all things in the universe depend on something other than themselves for their existence. Thus, the createdness of the universe was guaranteed for Thomas not in its having a beginning, but in its being dependent in some respect. Consequently, he envisioned the possibility that an eternal universe could be caused insofar as everything in that universe were dependent in the line of existence.

Thus, the defender of the createdness of the universe is not necessarily defending its having a beginning. The defender of the createdness of the universe is defending the view that the universe is dependent in some respect, and the respect in which it is dependent cannot be accounted for without a being of a wholly different kind than those that constitute the universe.

So, to finish with a question, I would like to ask: is there any way of justifying the principle, often assumed in these discussions, that what does not have a beginning does not have a cause?

This is a précis of an article of mine published in Religious Studies, ‘A Thomistic Metaphysics of Creation’, available on the Religious Studies website. 

Open-mindedness and Intellectual Virtue

One question that all virtue epistemologists face is: what traits are intellectual virtues? Defending a satisfactory answer to this question is important for virtue epistemology (VE) because, on VE, knowledge and justification are understood in terms of intellectual virtue. Virtue epistemologists are divided, with respect to this question, in both their methods and answers. A standard method, in the spirit of Aristotle, is to take the notion of epistemic flourishing to be conceptually prior to the concept of intellectual virtue. On such a view, intellectual virtues will be those traits that are appropriately connected to the fundamental epistemic end of epistemic flourishing. Given that this fundamental end is not a very precise concept, virtue epistemologists typically opt for a more theoretically simple picture, by defending something like the following:

Epistemic Value (Truth)-Monism (EVM): True belief is the fundamental epistemic aim. 

EVM is endorsed explicitly or implicitly by most virtue epistemologists. For those who accept EVM as a thesis about fundamental epistemic value, it's rather easy to generate a formula for identifying what traits are epistemic virtues: Trait T is an epistemic virtue iff T is appropriately connected to the end of true belief. 

How must intellectual virtues be 'appropriately connected' to the end of true belief? There is disagreement on this point. Some virtue epistemologists (virtue reliabilists) (Greco 1999; Sosa 1993; 2007) opt for a reliable-success view of the relevant connection: a trait is an intellectual virtue iff it is a stable feature of one's cognitive character that reliably generates true beliefs and avoids error. Others (some of whom are called virtue responsibilists) embrace a 'motivationalist' picture of this connection (e.g. Montmarquet 1991; Battaly 2004). On the motivationalist picture, a trait is an epistemic virtue iff a manifestation of the trait is characterised by a motivation for truth. Zagzebski (2006) embraces a conception of intellectual virtue that is a mix between virtue-reliabilism and virtue-motivationalism, and which is stronger than either separately. Zagzebski thinks, following Aristotle, that virtues have both a motivational component and a reliable success component. Accordingly, for Zagzebski, the satisfaction of both the motivational requirement and the reliability requirement are necessary for intellectual while neither alone is sufficient.

The motivationalist picture is probably the least popular, and this is because all the other views hold that 'reliably getting one to the truth' is at least a necessary ingredient of intellectual virtue. Sosa and Greco have argued especially forcefully in favour of the reliability component as both necessary and sufficient for intellectual virtue. As Heather Battaly (2004) has noted, and Wayne Riggs (2010)  has observed elsewhere, a certain plausible candidate intellectual virtue makes some serious trouble for the view that a reliable success condition is necessary for intellectual virtue. This is the trait of openmindedness. (For a discussion of the nature of openmindedness, see here). The manifestation of openmindedness might well reliably bring individuals to the truth. However, it seems mistaken to suggest that what makes openmindedness an intellectual virtue is that openminded individuals reliably get to the truth.  Battaly has suggested that what makes openmindedness an intellectual virtue has to do solely with openminded individuals' motivation. Here's Battaly (2004):

What makes open-mindedness, so construed, an intellectual virtue?  What makes it an intellectual, rather than a moral, virtue is its motivational component.  Even though it need not track the truth, it is characterized by a motivation for truth.  What makes it a virtue, rather than a skill or a habit of some other sort?  It is a virtue partly because it is an entrenched habit that expresses the agent’s epistemic values.[35]  The morally just person wants to respect the rights of others appropriately because she wants what appears good and believes that respecting the rights of others appropriately is good.  In this manner, the motivational component of justice expresses her moral values.  Analogously, the open-minded person wants to listen to others’ ideas that are thought to be true because she wants the truth and thinks that she can attain it by listening to those ideas.  Moreover, she wants the truth because it appears good from an epistemic point of view.  Accordingly, the motivational component of open-mindedness expresses her epistemic values.

 Is this plausible? If so, should we think that what makes any trait an intellectual virtue has something to do with one's motivation and nothing to do with reliably achieving the truth? One problem here is that a motivationalist picture would seem to exclude a plausible explanation for why faculty virtues (i.e. good memory) constitute intellectual virtues. Faculty virtues, as Sosa and Greco note, aid us epistemically by reliably getting us to the truth, and involve no obvious motivational element.

It seems that reflecting on openmindedness presents three options for the virtue epistemologist. First, maintain that reliability is a necessary ingredient of intellectual virtue and explain (contra Battaly and Montmarquet) how the epistemic value of openmindedness lies primarily in its reliability. Secondly, deny that openmindeness is an intellectual virtue because it reliably brings about the truth, and insist that it is so rather because it involves a virtuous motivation for truth, and then defend a motivationalist account of intellectual virtue more broadly. Thirdly, one might reject the EVM picture in favour of a pluralist account of fundamental epistemic value and explain why openmindedness is an intellectual virtue by way of its connection to some fundamental epistemic value other than truth. Which, if any, of these avenues is most plausible?

Undergraduate Philosophy Conference (Liverpool)

Welcome back! There will be a number of posts in the near-future outlining some exciting changes and events associated with The Big Questions, so check back frequently. One minor change beginning this semester is that we are going to update the blog with information about local philosophy events. I wanted to mention this one as soon as possible because the due date is soon (10 February): there will be an upcoming undergraduate philosophy conference at the University of Liverpool, and submissions are being accepted until midnight 10 Feb. See below for details.

Details

To all philosophers! We are pleased to announce that the University of Liverpool Philosophy Society will be holding its first Undergraduate Philosophy Conference next March. Submissions are welcome from anyone with current undergraduate status or equivalent.
Your papers can be on any topic you wish, from analytic discussion to continental enquiry, and any branch of philosophy. This is an opportunity to pursue your own interests in philosophy and we are hoping for a wide variety of topics. Please note that the papers should be clearly written, argumentative and demonstrate some original thinking, not merely descriptive or a simple regurgitation of a particular philosopher's work. The required length is 3000-5000 words to ensure at least 20-30 mins presenting time.
If your paper is accepted, all expenses except travel will be covered by the conference.
Please submit your papers to H.E.Lewendon-Evans@student.liverpool.ac.uk. For each paper, please attach a cover letter that includes an abstract of the paper, your name, institution and email address. The submission deadline is midnight of Friday 10th February 2012.

For more information, see here .