SJP Special Issue: The Lives of Human Animals

The Southern Journal of Philosophy has just published an annual Spindel Supplement on animalism and a new theory of personal identity. The problem of personal identity is one of the most bewitching puzzles in all of philosophy. Consider how much each of us changes during our lifetimes. In so many ways—biologically, psychologically, socially, physically—you are today very different from the person you were last year or twenty years ago or on the day of your birth. And yet just one person has persisted through these changes. The first facet of the problem of personal identity focuses our attention on this question: what exactly are the conditions under which beings like you and me persist through time and change?

Until quite recently, most philosophers subscribed to the answers to these questions advocated by the seventeenth-century British philosopher, John Locke. Locke held that our fundamental nature is given by our status as self-conscious, rational agents (“persons”) and that the conditions under which we persist through time and change are thus to be accounted for in terms of psychological continuity. Central to this view is a sharp distinction between the person and her animal body.

But today’s Lockeans face a powerful new challenge to the distinction underlying their core commitments. According to the view known as animalism, there is no distinction to be drawn between human persons and their animal bodies. You do not “have” a body in the sense that you are one thing and the animal located where you are is something else. Rather, on this view, human persons just are their animal bodies: the primate located where you are is you.

Though Aristotelian in spirit, animalism is a relative latecomer to the debate over personal identity, having been articulated and defended only within the past twenty-five years or so. During these first two and a half decades of work, advocates of the view sought mainly to specify and defend its central claims and to understand its relation to the Lockean opposition. While highly important work along these lines continues to be done, a second, overlapping wave of work on animalism seems now to be emerging. This new wave is beginning to broaden animalism’s import beyond metaphysics and philosophy of mind into a diverse array of fields and topics, including ethics, philosophy of language, conjoined twinning, epistemology, evolutionary theory, philosophy of religion, death, and so on.

The guiding aim of the thirty-second annual Spindel Conference on “The Lives of Human Animals” (University of Memphis, September 26–28, 2013) was to spotlight and facilitate this second wave of work by providing a forum in which metaphysicians and philosophers of mind working on animalism were brought together with philosophers who are presently engaged in pertinent debates in other areas of philosophy. The Spendel conference and supplementary issue were organized by Stephen Blatti, former SJP editor and associate professor of philosophy at the University of Memphis.

Read the full issue here!

Call for Papers – Bioethics IAB 12th World Congress 2014

Bioethics Call for Papers IAB 12th World Congress, 2014

Bioethics Special Issue
Publication September 2015

The Editors of Bioethics are pleased to announce a special issue in 2015 featuring papers selected from those presented at the 12th World Congress of the International Association of Bioethics, June 2014, in Mexico City.

We invite all presenters at the conference to consider submitting their papers for selection.

Upon submission authors should include full contact details (especially e-mail address), a brief abstract of approximately 250 words and a few lines of biographical information all in a single electronic file.  we discourage papers of more than 5,000 words.

For further submission requirements, including format and referencing style, please refer back to Author Guidelines on the Bioethics website.

Manuscripts should be submitted to Bioethics online at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/biot

Please ensure that you select manuscript type ‘Special Issue’ and state that it is for the IAB Special Issue when prompted.

Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism – Special Issue

From The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, a special issue on Song, Songs and Singing.

Edited by Jeanette Bicknell and John Andrew Fisher

From the introduction:

The topic of song, songs, and singing extends across a vast number of art forms and genres back into prehistory. It stands astride the high-low art continuum, ranging from classical music to popular and folk music. Unlike other art forms that include both high and low genres (such as movies and novels), song and songs have always had multiple functions other than being objects of aesthetic appreciation. The uses of vocal music range from the sacred (sung as hymns as well as heard as masses, anthems, and so on), to communal (campfire songs and soccer fans’ chants), to ceremonial (Jerusalem sung at public events, Barber’s Agnus Dei performed at memorials), to music for entertainment and for dancing; unlike other art forms, songs and singing play a role in everyday life.

From the point of view of philosophy of music, instrumental and vocal music have performed an intricate pas de deux over the last three centuries. In the eighteenth century, purely instrumental musical works began to interest music theoreticians. By the nineteenth century, such works by the great composers largely supplanted vocal music as higher art in the minds of philosophically inclined thinkers. Undoubtedly, understanding the nature and metaphysics of autonomous instrumental musical works involves challenging philosophical issues. Yet it would be a mistake to regard this historical progression as charting a journey from attention to something that is not art (songs) toward something that is (sonatas). In reality, these are two broad types of music, each calling for philosophical attention.

Click here to read the special issue !

Virtual Collection – Ethics in a Changing World

As a study of human action, ethics is particularly attuned to changes in the world around us. Our lives are profoundly shaped by new technology, globalization, climate change, and changing social roles – raising ethical questions about the choices we make in response to these far-reaching developments.

In order to celebrate the publication of The International Encyclopedia of Ethics,  we have curated a virtual collection of over 50 journal articles and book chapters on global ethics with a special focus on Chinese researchers and academics.

Click here to read the introduction in English or translated into Chinese, then read the articles for free!

Download FREE ‘Philosophy Spotlight’ app

Wiley Spotlight Apps are essential for all researchers, faculty, students and professionals. Philosophy Spotlight gives you:

• Up-to-the-minute abstracts from leading journals in the field
• Cutting-edge Special and Virtual Issues, with free content
• Latest Video Abstracts, Expert Publishing Workshops, and Informative Podcasts
• Updates and news on key conferences
• And more!

Whether you want to keep track of broad trends across philosophy  or focus on a subfield, the Spotlight App is an indispensable tool for your research and teaching.

Call for Papers: The Metaphysics of Time and Modality

For this special issue of Thought we invite papers that make a contribution to either the metaphysics of time or of modality, or that illuminate the connections between them.

Metaphysicians of modality argue over whether ontology extends beyond the actual just as metaphysicians of time argue over whether ontology extends beyond the present; and we might also ask whether it is a stable position to hold that reality includes the non-present but not the non-actual. There are modal analogues of McTaggart’s infamous argument for the unreality of time, and we can ask whether the modal and temporal arguments stand or fall together. We might wonder whether trans-world identity should be treated differently from identity across time, and whether if existence is contingent it must also be temporary, etc.

Papers should correspond to the standard Thought guidelines and be no longer than 4500 words, including footnotes. Papers are to be submitted before 31st May 2013. When submitting please ensure you select article type as “The Metaphysics of Time and Modality Special Issue” to ensure your paper is reviewed via the special issue route.

Please see Author Guidelines for details on how to submit.

Hypatia Symposium: Speaking of Animal Bodies by GRETA GAARD

In Hypatia 27.3, a special issue on “Animal Others”, leading feminist animal studies scholars, Lori Gruen (author of Ethics and Animals: An Introduction) and Kari Weil (author of Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now) present exciting new work on the intersections of sex, race, gender, and species. As co-editors of the special issue, Gruen and Weil invited six scholars to reflect on some of the lively debates occurring within this burgeoning new field of scholarship. Join the discussion.

…….
Title:  Speaking of Animal Bodies

 By: GRETA GAARD

Associate Professor, University of Wisconsin-River Falls

Read the full special issue here

Download a PDF of this Symposium

Has the growth of animal studies been good for animals?

The capacity to ask this question—indeed, to make it central to one’s intellectual, scholarly, and pedagogical work—is the hallmark of feminism. Not merely an academic endeavor or a “way of seeing,” feminism emerged through women who recognized their own lived experiences of marginalization, oppression, and inequality (whether via race, gender, class, sexuality, age, ability—and usually some nexus thereof) not as personal deficits or biological necessities to be accepted and endured, but rather as socially produced political problems to be challenged. As political and material circumstances allowed (and often when they didn’t), feminist women stepped forward to work with other women and feminist men to challenge social hierarchies and create social change. From the start, feminism has been a