As promised, here’s the video of the February 16, 2010 panel discussion at UCLA about the science and ethics of animal-based research, sponsored by Bruins for Animals and Pro-Test for Science.
UCLA Panel on Science and Ethics of Animal Research from Dario Ringach on Vimeo.
The video runs for about 2.5 hours, so you might want to grab a glass of water or a cup of coffee before you launch it.
One is that my hands are tired from writing all those comments, which means I don’t feel like typing.
Another is described in this brief video.
The younger Free-Ride offspring’s soccer team has been playing in a regional tournament this weekend, and we’re girding our loins and guarding our shins to go out and play a second day of tournament games. I’m happy that they’re playing so well, but I have to say, watching games in late November is a different experience than spectating in mid-September. (Bone-chilling cold + bad sunburn = some kind of tangible sign of a parent’s devotion. If only one’s child took it seriously.)
Anyway, in the meantime, I wanted to test your knowledge in the identification of some turkeys.
Specifically, the turkeys currently adorning the door to my department’s main office.
Here they are one by one:
Because, as it happens, I tend to notice patterns in student papers, then end up musing on them rather than, you know, buckling down and just working through the stack of papers that needs grading.
In my philosophy of science class, I have my students write short essays (approximately 400 words) about central ideas in some of the readings I’ve assigned. Basically, it’s a mechanism to ensure that they grapple with an author’s view (and its consequences) before they hear me lecture about it. (It’s also a way to get students writing as many words as they are required to write in an upper division general education course; sometimes assignments need to serve two masters.)
Anyhow, because these papers are focused on the task of explaining in plain English what some philosopher seems to be saying in the reading assignment, there are plenty of sentences in these essays that contain phrases like “AuthorLastName {claims, thinks, argues that, writes} …”
And, in at least 5-10% of the papers turned in to me, the author’s last name is spelled incorrectly.
Among other things, I’ve noticed:
Including this question which, apparently, led a popular search engine to direct someone to this very blog:
Is philosophy tested on animals?
No. No, it isn’t.
(Actually, it’s not clear to me that all of it is tested on humans, either.)
No, I’m not going to be able to get away with claiming that truth is beauty, and beauty, truth.
The first issue in understanding truth is recognizing that truth is a property of a proposition. (What’s a proposition? A proposition is a claim.) A proposition that is true has a certain kind of correspondence with the world about which it is making a claim. A proposition that is false does not have this correspondence.
At the most basic level, what we want from this correspondence seems pretty obvious: what the propositions says about the world matches up with how the world actually is.
Actually, it might be a philosophical question.
Younger offspring: One of my classmates told me that you fart every second.
Via Twitter, PalMD wondered if I’d seen this brief item on the New York Times Idea of the Day blog.
Writing in The Philosophers’ Magazine, Brooke Lewis says tallies of full-time faculty at top American and British colleges show women make up less than a fifth of philosophy departments in Britain and little more than that in the United States. This suggests “that gender representation is far less balanced in philosophy than it is in many other humanities subjects.”
Indeed, on quick examination, the gender balance among faculty in philosophy departments looks an awful lot like the gender balance among faculty in some typical science departments. This is not a new finding, and it’s certainly something those of us in academic philosophy have known about for some time.
The piece floats an idea for where this gender disparity might be coming from:
In my philosophy of science class yesterday, we talked about Semmelweis and his efforts to figure out how to cut the rates of childbed fever in Vienna General Hospital in the 1840s. Before we dug into the details, I mentioned that Semmelweis is a historical figure who easily makes the Top Ten list of Great Moments in Scientific Reasoning. (At the very least, Semmelweis is discussed in no fewer than three of the readings, by three separate authors, assigned for the course.)
But this raises the question: what else belongs on the Top Ten list of Great Moments in Scientific Reasoning?
(From here.)
Not that we won’t make plenty of other mistakes, but they’ll run more to Nietzsche than Rand.
Come to think of it, the eternal recurrence test is probably just right for bedtime stories, isn’t it?