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News
News: March/April 2011
Hume’s birthday parties • P4C pioneer Matthew Lipman dies • Philosophy Now launches Kindle edition — News reports by Sue Roberts
Hume celebrations
The 300th anniversary of the birth of David Hume on 26th April is to be marked by Edinburgh University with a year-long programme of special events. Hume studied at the university from the unusually young age of twelve, starting in 1723. The programme of lectures, exhibitions and activities is being hosted by the university’s Institute for the Advanced Studies in the Humanities, which also proposes to establish an annual David Hume Fellowship at Edinburgh University with the aim of making the university a centre for Hume studies. Ironically, Hume once applied to be Professor of Moral Philosophy at the university, but was rejected after the city’s ministers complained that he was an atheist. (He was later refused a similar post at Glasgow University for the same reason.)
Celebrations will also take place in Chirnside, the Scottish Borders village where David Hume grew up. A 300th Anniversary Philosophy Festival will be held and an Enlightenment Evening with Georgian banquet will take place at nearby Paxton House on 30th April. The organisers will be holding ‘thinking walks’ called Border Brains to guide locals and visitors through the landscape and the ideas and lives of Berwickshire’s geniuses. Borders high schools will compete for a David Hume Essay Prize, championing the virtues of free thought and argument.
Two pioneers die
Prof Denis Dutton of the University of Canterbury in New Zealand died in December. He was the Editor of the journal Philosophy and Literature and ran its notorious annual Bad Writing Contest (1995-8) to “celebrate the most stylistically lamentable passages found in scholarly books and articles.” Dutton was also the creator of Arts and Letters Daily, regarded by some literary-minded folk as the world’s best website.
Matthew Lipman, founder of the Philosophy for Children (P4C) movement and Professor Emeritus of Montclair State University, passed away on December 26 at home in New Jersey. Lipman’s experiences teaching philosophy to college and adult education students, set against the political upheaval that took place on university campuses in the 1960s, convinced him that learning to think critically, to inquire about philosophical questions and to form reasoned judgments should begin at a much earlier age. In 1974 he and Ann Margaret Sharp established the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children. He organised training workshops, created teaching manuals and wrote philosophical novels for young children. In time his work inspired similar initiatives in over forty countries.
Bizarre research projects No.254
Research reported in the New Scientist claims to have found a link between physical altitude and moral attitude. Four experiments were set up by a team from the University of North Carolina which they believe demonstrated the participants being more helpful and charitable at an elevated height. Briefly, people placed more in a charity collection tin at the top of an escalator than one at the bottom. People led up steps onto a stage to complete a questionnaire behaved more helpfully with a second unrelated task than those taken down the steps to do the same. Finally, more people returned fish to a lake from a simulated aircraft than from a passing car. (No, we didn’t understand that one either.)
Lifelong learner
A student at Austin Peay State University, Texas, has been awarded a departmental honorary Doctor of Metaphysics. 85-year-old Mildred Frensley has taken an active part in almost every philosophy course in the APSU Department of History & Philosophy since she joined a Critical Reasoning and Logic course in 1988. Dr Bert Randall, professor of philosophy, said of her “So often she has been my teacher. She has the most creative mind I have ever known. She is a prized student.” Mrs Frensley had previously earned a batchelor’s degree from Florida State University while raising a family of four children and working full-time.
Philosophy Now activities
We’ve been busy bees at Philosophy Now over the last couple of months. Recent activities include:
Philosophy Now on Kindle
After much negotiation and extensive technical work by our web genius Bora Dogan, the Kindle edition of Philosophy Now launched at the beginning of February. The Kindle is an electronic reading device produced by Amazon.com.
Philosophy Now Radio Show
The pilot episode of the Philosophy Now Radio Show was broadcast on the arts radio station ResonanceFM on 17th February. Grant Bartley presented the show, interviewing popular philosophy authors Mark Vernon and Peter Cave about their latest books, respectively called: How to be an Agnostic and How to Think Like a Bat. Grant remarked that the pilot episode should be called ‘How to Think Like an Agnostic Bat’.
London School of Philosophy
In a defiant response to the UK’s current funding crisis in adult education, seven former lecturers from London University’s Birkbeck College have established a brand new college for adult learners, with low overheads, a minimum of admin, no state subsidy, a rented lecture space and very reasonable course fees. The very first lecture of the London School of Philosophy (londonschoolofphilosophy.org) was given in January by Philosophy Now’s Dr Anja Steinbauer on ‘Philosophy and Literature’. The course was a complete sell-out (in a good sense!).
Philosophy Now Reader Survey
Many thanks to the almost five hundred subscribers who took part in our online survey in January. We’re still digesting what you all said and we’ll publish some of the highlights in our next issue. The survey was organised by Anne-Laure Alloncle, our business development guru.