The Philosophy majors strike again. At the university-wide awards dinner, Srey Ram Kuy, a double major in Philosophy and Microbiology, was presented with two honors the E.A. Cummings Award for academic achievement and contribution to community, and the Joanne Trow Woman of Achievement Award. Rachel McVean won the Outstanding Philosophy Student Award; she will begin graduate school at Simon Frasier University in the fall. The Matchette Award for best paper went to Alec Maki, for his paper, "Gyges: A Lost Dialogue." 1999 grad Kimberly Baldwin earned an internship to travel to Amsterdam to work in the International Women's Archives there. Diana Buccafurni was awarded a University URISC award to do collaborative work with Courtney Campbell on stem-cell research. Rita Strobel, an Applied Ethics Certificate student and biochemistry major, is working as a research associate at the Hastings Center, the leading medical ethics institute in the country.
This year's IDEAS MATTER series focused on the American Land Ethic and the legacy of Aldo Leopold. Organized by Peter List, with the assistance of Bill Uzgalis, the lectures drew big crowds more than a hundred students, faculty, and friends at each event and created an on-going conversation about the ideas that shape our relation to nature. Guest lecturers included J. Baird Callicott of the University of North Texas, a noted commentator on environmental ethics, and one of the leading philosophical interpreters of Aldo Leopold.
Gary Snyder, the author of Turtle Island and a Pulitzer-prize winning poet and essayist, gave the lecture that probably excited the most comment. The Philosophy Department invited Snyder to speak on campus, after a similar invitation was withdrawn by the College of Forestry, which feared controversy before an election. More than a thousand people came to hear Snyder speak about Buddhist ideas and environmental issues.
Readers can find the IDEAS MATTER Lectures on our website at IDEAS MATTER, and can participate in an on-going discussion of Snyder's ideas and the ethical legacy of Leopold.
The Department created a new course specifically designed to bring new students into a campus community of philosophy faculty and students. Called "Introduction to Philosophical Discourse," the class is a set of out-of-the-classroom experiences organized by philosophy faculty. Mike Scanlan, for example, invited students to his house for pizza and logic puzzles. Kathy Moore took a group of students out for evening boating on the Willamette River and a beautiful view of the moon rising over water.
Students went with Flo Leibowitz to a piano concert and the discussion that followed. Peter List invited students to hike McDonald Forest and think about environmental ethics. In these and many other events, students and faculty learned something about each other and about the philosophical enterprise, had some fun together, and nurtured a community of philosophy-folks on campus.
Hard decisions can't be made and controversies can't be resolved by any discipline, working alone. So Philosophy faculty are organizing courses that pull together faculty, students, and information from many different areas of expertise, and showing students how to organize, integrate, and apply ideas. Manuel Pacheco, Michael Scanlan, Courtney Campbell, Jeff Ramsey, and Peter List all are teaching interdisciplinary courses, exploring richly textured and layered contemporary issues: Who should control computerized information about private citizens? Should veterinary medicine teach surgery with live animals? How is scientific information used in making decisions about forest use? What effect do borders and boundaries have on peoples' senses of themselves and of their moral obligations to one another?
At the national meeting of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics, our own Program for Ethics, Science, and the Environment (PESE), was featured as a model for how to create an ethics center. And no wonder with the leadership of Courtney Campbell, PESE has completed a banner year as an epicenter of educational activities that link ethics to breaking controversies in public life. As a fitting climax to that year, PESE was selected by the Templeton Foundation as a model "Faculty and Curriculum" program. It will be featured in a nationwide publicity campaign next fall.
The first annual OSU Student Philosophy Conference was held on Saturday, May 15, 1999. Organized by Rachel McVean, Club Philosophy president, and Bill Uzgalis, the Club's advisor, the conference celebrated and promoted undergraduate work in philosophy.
Students and faculty gathered in the morning in Hovland Hall for coffee and pastries. In the afternoon, undergraduate students from OSU and the University of Oregon presented papers and engaged in spirited and thoughtful discussion. "There was good conversation from 9 am to 3 pm," Bill reported. "It was wonderful to see students displaying their work and engaging in sustained and serious philosophical discussion."
The conference was so successful that it will be repeated next year, this time at the University of Oregon.
Pulitzer-prize winning poet and essayist Gary Snyder lectured in the IDEAS MATTER Lecture Series last fall. The Philosophy Department invited him to speak about environmental ethics, after an invitation was withdrawn by the College of Forestry, which feared that Snyder might create controversy. This is surely proof, if any is needed, that ideas do matter, that what we believe makes a difference to how we act, and that a University's role its mission is to open students' minds to new ideas.
The 1999-2000 Lecture Series will study the idea of God in the year 2000, and feature a lecture by the Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who will join a full slate of national and international scholars in a conference to be televised nationwide.
< h3>PESE Turns Spotlight On Ethics In The UniversityThe moral obligations of professors, students, and administrators too often ignored as we study the obligations of everyone but ourselves were in the spotlight this year. Courtney Campbell gathered real-life dilemmas from people all around campus and developed them into a series of case studies. Then they sponsored a university-wide forum in which deans, students, and faculty debated how to resolve some of the toughest moral quandaries any of us ever face. The cases, with point-counterpoint comments written by OSU faculty, students, and administrators, are published in REFLECTIONS (March 1999, available on the web at Reflections March 99.
Now Courtney, with the assistance of Karen Russ, the new assistant to PESE, is creating a board game ACADEMIC ETHICS in which teams of players compete to come up with the best solutions. They will market the game to publishers this fall.
Students looking for advice and models for writing philosophy papers and everyone else, for that matter can now find the Philosophy Department's writing guide on the web at: Writing Guide
The guide, written and revised by a faculty team (Philosophy faculty Courtney Campbell, Jon Dorbolo, Kathy Moore, Jeff Ramsey, Bill Uzgalis, and WIC director Vicki Collins) and published by Kendall/Hunt in 1998, has long been a useful tool for students in philosophy classes. Now it is even easier to find and use, thanks to Bill Uzgalis, who directed the process of scanning the book and converting it to html. The project was funded by a grant from the OSU Writing-Intensive Curriculum.
The sun shone on us again this year at the Department's annual picnic. More than fifty students, faculty, staff, and friends gathered by the river for potluck and hamburgers. Sandra Davis and Peter List were presented with Special Service Awards for their above-and-beyond contributions to the philosophy community. Faculty presented gifts to our graduating seniors for each student, a book personally chosen by a faculty member.
There were speeches and congratulations and applause all the elements of a celebration and then the eighth annual Philosophical Games began! This year, it was the Turing Game. The Turing machine is famous in philosophical history, as an experiment suggested by Alan Turing to determine if machines could think. Experts should pose questions to a human and a machine hidden behind screens, Turing suggested, to see if they could identify the machine by the nature of its answers. In our game, student-faculty "panels of experts" posed questions to two people hidden behind a screen, trying to distinguish man from woman, or student from professor, or Scanlan from Pacheco. The game ended in general chaos, which the judges determined to be a tie.
This winter, we asked alumni and friends to send their support for the IDEAS MATTER Lecture Series. Our goal was to fully endow the lectures in three years, with an endowment of $100,000. The response was wonderful. People from all parts of the country mailed in checks and often included warm letters filled with news and encouragement. Many sent special greetings to Warren Hovland, who had been their professor and mentor. We are grateful for the financial support, and we are grateful for the moral support, the messages encouraging us to "keep up the good work."
In all, thirty-one people sent checks for a total of $10, 590, which includes a nice gift from Warren and Sue Hovland, their birthday gifts to each other. A good friend of the department matched each gift, doubling its value. So, adding all this to prior gifts, we have an endowment of $17, 545 for IDEAS MATTER, a great start toward our goal. Next year, we are planning fun fund-raising events, including a tasting of wines from the Amity Vineyard, hosted by Vikki Wettle, a Philosophy Department graduate.
Two new books published by philosophy faculty this year ask two very different questions. Marc Borg's new book, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions, asks Jesus' question, "Who do you say that I am?" The Meaning of Jesus is a point-counterpoint debate about the historical Jesus between Marc, who is the most popular liberal voice on Jesus, and N.T. Wright, the most prominent standard-bearer for the traditional view. The authors' mutual respect "models an ideal way to disagree," one reviewer said, the "intelligent spirit of searching for common ground."
While Kathleen Dean Moore's prior book of essays, Riverwalking, took philosophy along rivers, Holdfast takes philosophy to the edges of quiet water mountain lakes, tule marshes, and the Pacific Ocean. Like the holdfast that roots kelp to the sea floor, Kathy argues that a deep experience and embrace of the natural world gives meaning and joy to our scattered, isolating lives.
Bill Uzgalis attended the biggest gathering of philosophers in history, the World Congress held in Boston last summer, where he spoke about computer use in philosophy courses. . . . After a feature article in USA Today, an interview with Terry Gross on NPR's Fresh Air, and more than 80 days lecturing "on the road," Marc Borg has become a national figure in religion and culture, the sort of academic whom people recognize in airports. . . . This year, Flo Leibowitz completed a term on the American Philosophical Association program committee, and wrote essays on aesthetics for Sforzando and Film and Philosophy. She's in the French Alps this summer a good setting for studying the sublime! . . . Lani Roberts was the recipient of the Honors College's inaugural "Outstanding University Honors College Professor" Award, an especially gratifying endorsement from Honors students, who are overwhelmingly in science and engineering.
Peter List's new book, Environmental Ethics and Forestry: A Reader has been accepted for publication from the Temple University Press. . . . Kathy Moore spent fall term on sabbatical on a dude ranch in Wyoming, where she finished her new book Holdfast and wrote essays for High Country News, River, and other journals; while she was on leave, Peter List served as department chair. . . . Congratulations to Manuel Pacheco, who was promoted to associate professor with tenure this year. . . . Sandra Davis continues to take OSU classes including Courtney's course on death and dying while she serves as office specialist for the department. "Death and dying was a heck of a lot better than math," she says. . . . Tim Hosoi has announced that he will retire at the end of 1999. . . . After teaching as an adjunct instructor at OSU for three years, Joan Woolfry has left for Virginia, to take a professorial position at Longwood College. . . Eric Salahub has a new job too; a long-time ethics instructor in the department, Eric served as assistant director of the summer school for two years, and will now be a professor at Front Range Community College in Fort Collins, Colorado.
Lois Summers vacationed in the Cayman Islands, where she snorkeled in deep waters -- good practice for swimming through the silty, shifting tides of bureaucracies and budgets. . . . It's apt that Jeff Ramsey has been teaching about the nature of time, because he's been especially busy this year, writing articles for Philosophy and Chemistry and Perspectives on Science: Historical, Philosophical and Sociological. . . . Michael Scanlan is editing a festschrift in honor of his teacher, John Corcoran. This will appear in the Fall as a special edition of the journal History and Philosophy of Logic. Courtney Campbell, just back from the midwest where he showed science profs ways to teach students about the ethical implications of their work, is on the road again. His latest communication: "In Washington, D.C. for meeting on stem cell research. Wish you were here. CC."