24 April 2014

new SPELbaby


beautiful ** ILSA **, via Edgar Valdez


very reflective for a newborn


congratulations


to everybody who did stuff this year.

(the list is on the listserv)

yay!


22 April 2014

Logic exam


reminder:

SPEL Basic Exam in Formal Logic is tomorrow (4/23).

10am, I think.


21 April 2014

Democracy?

Gilens and Page:

The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized 
groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government 
policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent 
influence. Our results provide substantial support for theories of Economic Elite Domination 
and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or 
Majoritarian Pluralism.

paper: here

media coverage:

New Yorker
BBC
TPM
MSNBC
WaPo
Krugman



11 April 2014

Standpoint epistemology



this is what things look like from Inside Higher Ed

Josh goes to Germany


congrats to SPELalum Joshua Wretzel, who won a grant from the Max Kade Foundation to spend some time at the Forschungskolleg Analytic German Idealism in Leipzig.


This one's for Max


link to The Daily Beast

(click through to hear from Petronella Ravenshear)

10 April 2014

04 April 2014

SPEL Colloquium


Prof. Dr. Rainer Forst
Goethe-Universität zu Frankfurt

"Transnational Justice and Democracy: Overcoming Three Dogmas of Political Theory"

Tue 29 April
5-7pm
UUW 324


misc.


I wonder if this has any bearing on the ideal of a well-ordered society:

"Spite is Good. Spite Works"
Although groups of excessively spiteful or selfish players quickly collapsed, and rigidly fair-minded societies were readily destabilized by influxes of selfish exploiters, the flexible sharers not only proved able to coexist with the spiteful types, but the presence of spitefuls had the salubrious effect of enhancing the rate of fair exchanges among the genials. By the looks of it, Dr. Smead said, “fairness is acting as a defense against spite.”
The results echo other recent research suggesting that human decency and cooperation require a certain degree of so-called altruistic punishment: the willingness of some individuals to punish rule breakers even when the infraction does not directly affect them — challenging the guy who broke into the line behind you, for example.
“It could be that Nietzsche was right about punishment,” Dr. Forber said, “that it originated as spite and only later was turned into a mechanism for maintaining fairness and justice.”
can't find my other links, so this will have to do for "misc."

02 April 2014

Graduate Application for Degree (GAFD)--Deadline is Monday


If you think that you will be taking a degree this semester, you MUST complete the Graduate Application for Degree (GAFD), available now on the Graduate School websiteThe deadline is Monday, April 7 to guarantee inclusion in the Commencement program.

Here’s the link for your graduation checklist:  http://www.binghamton.edu/commencement/students/checklist.html
For more information, visit the commencement website:  http://www.binghamton.edu/commencement/index.html

*note: you should do this if you think it might be somewhat possible that you could be taking a degree this semester. it's easier to cancel later than to register late.

Brown Bag Lunch



Discussion of Kenneth Walden, "The Aid that Leaves Something to Chance," Ethics 124:2

CompLit Conference room (15th floor)
April 10th (that's a THU)
11:45am

*this is the kind of brown bag lunch where you actually have to bring your own lunch. in a brown bag.