Beginning last winter, OSU instituted a program called High School Outreach (HSO). HSO allows academically prepared high school students to take certain OSU courses for regular credit. The main goal of HSO is to offer challenging and exciting coursework to high school students who have completed their high school graduation require ments. One of the charter HSO course offerings is InterQuest Odyssey: Introduction to Philosophy.
Eric Salahub is working this summer to promote and develop HSO. "What I find really exciting," Eric says, "is the chance to inform high school students about what philosophy is. I hope these students take InterQuest and come to campus with an affinity for philosophy and a built-in comfort level with our department. Similarly, I hope they come to campus as college freshmen ready to use the philosophical reading, writing, and thinking skills that InterQuest teaches."
For more information on OSU's HSO, visit our web page at http://osu.orst.edu/dept/precoll/HSO
As the University prepares itself to offer first-rate education in the professions, the Philosophy Department is doing its part by designing and teaching new interdisciplinary short courses on professional ethics. The courses, taught intensively in a weekend, are team-taught by Courtney Campbell and a faculty member in the appropriate professional school. Taught this year were courses on professional responsibility for health care providers and for gerontologists. The next course will be on professional responsibility in engineering, a course that Courtney will teach with Michelle Bothwell, from Bioresource Engineering.
The Philosophy Department's annual lecture series focussed this year on the widening gap between rich and poor in America. In eleven weekly events, large audiences made up of faculty, students, and townspeople heard a wide variety of views. These included a panel of Corvallis-area women on welfare; Professor Howard Zinn, a Boston Universit political scientist and the author of the well-known People's History of the United States; Carl Upchurch, director of the National Council for Urban Peace and Justice; and Tommy Lott, philosophy professor at the University of St. Louis. The final event was a student debate organized by Manuel Pacheco, about the obligation of rich nations to help the world's poor. The conference was organized by Manuel Pacheco and Bill Uzgalis.
Lani Roberts was named a Master Teacher in the College of Liberal Arts. She is the second philosophy professor to be granted this honor, along with Kathleen Moore, who was named a Master Teacher in 1995. Lani will teach ethics in a three-term series of courses that also includes courses taught by Rebecca Warner of Sociology and John Gillis, from Psychology.
Michael Scanlan taught a new course this year on Ethics and Computers. The course, offered under a Computer Science number, explored many of the vexing moral problems created by advances in computer technology, including copyright and privacy issues.
Jeff Ramsey with Ken Krane of the Physics Department taught a one credit seminar for the Honors College. The course, "The Physics and Philosophy on the concept of time," received so much interest from students that it will be taught again during Winter 1998.
The Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies (MAIS) degree in Applied Ethics provides graduate students with in-depth understanding of ethics in today's world. The program explores the ethical issues and challenges that advancements in science and technology present to informed citizens and science professionals. Students take core courses in ethical theory and philosophy, courses and practicums in an applied ethics area (Ethics and Natural Resources, or Ethics and the Professions), and special courses in a complementary discipline. The program is capped by a master's thesis or project which is mentored by Philosophy faculty.
The Philosophy Department is proud that one of our studentsTroy Witherritewas named one of only eight out standing seniors in the College of Liberal Arts this year. As Kathleen Moore wrote in her nomination letter, "Troy is an exemplar of what an outstanding liberal arts student can be. A superb student in one major, Philosophy, Troy is also a superb students in his second major, Biochemistry. As a result, when he graduates this spring to go on to medical school, he will be an exciting and accomplished studentone in a position to demonstrate the power of an education that provides the factual background necessary for learning the details of medical practice, and at the same time, the perspective and critical thinking skills necessary for a deep understanding of the moral landscape of his profession." At the University of Wisconsin next year, Troy will begin graduate study leading to both the M.D. and the Masters of Arts in Bioethics.
Marcus Borg published two new books this year. The first is Jesus at 2000, a compilation of the papers read at the Jesus 2000 conference held at OSU last year. The volume includes essays by some of the world's leading scholars of the historical Jesus, including Dominic Crossan, Houston Smith, and Marcus Borg. The second book is The God We Never Knew, of which the publisher says, "in a compelling, readable way, [Borg leads us to an image of God] that reconciles faith with science, history, critical thinking, and religious pluralism."
In other publishing news, Kathleen Dean Moore's book Riverwalking was published in paperback by Harcourt Brace this fall, and Oxford University Press brings out a paperback edition of her book, Pardons: Justice, Mercy, and the Public Interest in June.
Faculty representing sixteen universities and twenty-four disciplinesfrom anthropology to zoology, from geosciences to philosophygathered at the second annual CONFLUENCES conference at the OSU Marine Sciences Center on the Oregon coast. Organized by the Philosophy Department's Program for Ethics, Science, and the Environment, the conference's aim was to create a community of scholars whose interests converge at the intersection of ethics, science, and the environment. In its remarkable variety of participants and the richness of the discussions, CONFLUENCES is unique in the nation. This year's program demonstrated again the value of interdisciplinary and interinstitutional disussion of ethics.
Dr. Annette Dula, a research associate at the University of Colorado, was a visiting professor in the Philosophy Department during spring term. Dr. Dula taught a seminar about moral issues in health care for African-Americans. Dr. Dula is the author of a highly acclaimed book on minority health care ethics, called It Just Ain't Fair. Guest lecturers in the course included Dr. Joy James, an Ethnic Studies professor at the University of Colorado and the author of two recent books, Transcending the Talented Tenth: Black Leaders and American Intellectuals and Radicalism, Gender, and Race in U.S. Culture; and Dr. Ronald David, a physician and former Undersecretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, who now teaches at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.
President Clinton's National Bioethics Advisory Commission commissioned a paper from Courtney Campbell examining the views of religious traditions about human cloning following successful animal cloning in Scotland and Oregon. With the help of Joan Woolfrey, instructor, Courtney developed a 95-page study of the moral views on human cloning held by a variety of religious traditions, from African - American to Baptist to Buddhist. Woolfrey and Campbell also edited short essays on human cloning from religious scholars to compile a special issue of REFLECTIONS, the news letter of the Program for Ethics, Science, and the Environment.
Bill Uzgalis has developed a web-based history of philosophy module Great Voyages: The History of Western Philosophy from 1492 to 1776" that uses the multimedia and hyper-text capability of the World Wide Web to create for students a virtual representation of the world he wants them to learn about. For this accomplishment, the Department nominated him for the 1997 Educom Medal. Building on the analogy between the great voyages of discovery and the great intellectual journeys that took place at the same time, the web site is a model for how professors can use information resources to enrich a courseto provide historical context for philosophical discussions, to help students understand the world-changing importance of the ideas they study, and even to give students a sense of the romance of the voyages of intellectual discovery.
As he was returning to OSU last fall, senior Philosophy major Jason Regier was involved in an auto accident that left him without the use of his arms and legs. That Jason will complete his courses and graduate with his class is testimony to his courage and hard work, and to his faith in himself. Peter List and Lani Roberts will offer summer school instruction to Jason, and Lani will travel to Jason's home in Denver to help him complete his ethics course. Jason's efforts have moved and inspired the Philosophy faculty, who have learned from him that even under the most trying circumstances, ideas matter.
After going through four revisions, the Philosphy Department's Writing Philosophy Papers: A Student Guide went to the publisher in May. It will be available for students to use next fall. The writing guide was an intensive collaborative effort by five faculty members: Bill Uzgalis, Jeff Ramsey, Kathleen Moore, Jon Dorbolo, and Courtney Campbell. The guide will help students write careful and cogent papers in all their philosophy classes.