The Owl of Minerva

We come together each month of the academic year to engage in genuine, spontaneous philosophy. To think, to listen, to argue on the spur of the moment, in an atmosphere of friendship and hospitality--that is our mission. If you want to experience philosophy as a pedantic exegesis of old texts, or as a springboard for egotistic reverie, we encourage you to look elsewhere. At each meeting, people freely put their names into a hat, and a speaker for the following month is chosen. The only qualification for being a speaker is that you have taken at least one philosophy class in your life. Each talk is limited to 20 minutes (with a 15 minute warning), and the only requirement regarding content is that you present YOUR OWN ARGUMENT to the group (not something you found in Plato or Heidegger or Aquinas--although you can certainly draw on such). A period of lively questioning and discussion always follows.

The next OWL will be Thursday, April 24^th, 7:30 pm-9:00 pm:

‘Could Socrates Conceive of Zombies?’

Presented by:

Andrew Lang, M.A. Philosophy (DSPT), B.A. Liberal Arts (Thomas Aquinas College)

Say to yourself, for example: ‘The children over there are mere automata; all their liveliness is mere automatism.’ And you will either find these words becoming quite meaningless; or you will produce in yourself some kind of uncanny feeling, or something of the sort.
~Ludwig Wittgenstein (Philosophical Investigations, 420)

Come to this corpulent consideration of the flesh-eating friends of philosophy. Are the physicalist at risk of getting their brains eaten by the possibility of philosophical zombies (or p-zombies) who are identical physically, behaviorally, and functionally to ordinarily humans, but lack the subjective “what it is like” of consciousness? “Zombieist” philosophers of mind such as David Chalmers and Thomas Nagel have been chomping at the bit with arguments that because p-zombies are indistinguishable physically from a conscious human being, consciousness therefore must not be physical. But is there even the possibility of such undead mischief, which would entail re-opening the possibility of dualism? Or are zombies “an unambiguous self-refutation” as repudiated by Daniel Dennett?

In the galleria at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology,

2301 Vine Street, Berkeley, CA 94708

For more information, call: (510) 883-2073

Admission is Free.

Past Presenters and what they presented on:

April 18th, 2002 Br. Anselm Ramelow, O.P. > The Statistics of Freedom.
May 7th, 2002 Craig Sutphin > What is thinking?
September 24th, 2002 Br. Tom Irish, O.P. > Being Someone, Being Oneself.
October 28th, 2002 Jack Phillips > The Role of the Individual in an Intelligent Universe.
November 12th, 2002 Bodhi Stone > Solipsism vs. Commonsense in Middle-Late Wittgenstein.
December 12th, 2002 Maureen Baldwin > The News vs. Nous.
March 6th, 2003 Open Discussion "What is Justice?" > Discussion about Justice

April 2nd, 2003 Sophia Leahy > Can Wisdom be funny?

May 15th, 2003 Professor John Ferrari > Plato and Freud on the Health of the Soul.

October 18th, 2003 Jennifer Hudin, Ph.D. > Can Science Explain Consciousness?

November 18^th, 2003 Br. Robert King, O.P. > The Primacy of Play: All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy

December 4^th, 2003 Bodhi Stone > How Do I Know What You Believe?

February 24^th, 2004 Br. Christopher Fadok, O.P. > Locating Scepticism in a Theory of Knowledge

March 30th, 2004 Br. Raphael Mary Thomas Salzillo, O.P. > How Do We Know that Nature is Uniform?

April 27th, 2004 Derek Baker > Dreaming Skepticism

August 16th, 2004 Nicolaus Tideman, Ph.D. > Justice and Morality

September 27th, 2004 Jason Escalante > Rhetoric and Reason: Is Rhetoric Reasonable?

October 18th, 2004 Sophia Leahy > Why does Plato use humor in his dialogues?

November15th, 2004 Jason Van Boom > The Just Balance: The psycho-politics of rhetoric and dialectic

December 6th, 2004 Open Discussion > Just War Discussion

February 22^nd, 2005 Fred Foldvary, Ph.D. > Geo-Libertarianism

March 31st, 2005 Lowell Moorcroft > Great Chains and Handmaidens: Philosophy's Relationship with Others

May 5th, 2005 Br. Robert King, OP > Participation and John Paul II's Intersubjectivity

May 12th, 2005 Sophia Leahy > Rectifying our Taste for Punishment

October 13^th, 2005 Jason Escalante > Is Science Science?

November 30th, 2005 Br. James Junipero Moore, O.P. > Music and Virtue Ethics

March, 8^th, 2006 Moderated discussion by Sophia Leahy > Walking on Eggshells

May 9^th, 2006 Prof. Mark Damien Delp, Ph.D > End of Reason: End of Science?

Oct 12^th, 2006 Br. Raphael Mary Salzillo, O.P. > Consciousness: Can Science or Philosophy Make Sense of it?

Oct 30th, 2006 Dr. Fred Foldvary > Natural Law

Nov 27th, 2006 Prof. Alice Sowaal, Ph.D > Mary Astell’s Serious Proposal: Mind, Method, and Custom

Feb 19, 2007 Sophia Leahy Stone, M.A. > Justice and Friendship in Brown v. Board of Education

April 2, 2007 Bodhi Stone > Does Science Track Truth?

May 7^th, 2007 Dr. Andrew Porter, GTU > Fallacies in Intelligent Design Creation

October 18^th, 2007 Prof. Frederick M. Dolan, CCA > What is Art?

November 15th, 2007 Eric Gerlach, M.A. > Say What You Mean: Wittgenstein and the Mad Tea Party

December 4th, 2007 Trevor Murphy, Ph.D > Seneca: The Pursuit of Knowledge as Self-Therapy

March 6^th, 2008, D’Agostino, Corban & Stone > Jesus, Dostoevsky & Nietzsche: Reading Matthew 18:3

Past Language Games
Image gallery

The Owl of Minerva 2301 Vine Street, Berkeley, CA 94708-1816