Bentham, Satan and Sartre

It’s often surprising how one’s teaching commitments throw up unusual combinations of topics and thinkers during any given week.  The last week felt particularly odd with six hours of first year seminars on Bentham’s Utilitarianism, an introduction to modern Satanism for my second and third year New and Alternative Religions module and concluding with a two hour workshop on Sartre’s concept of nothingness with my third year Life and Meaning module.  Oh yes, and a two hour first year lecture on Kant and the categorical imperative too.  I find myself formulating strange connections between them and one can easily imagine some academic variant of the Kevin Bacon Six Degrees of Separation party game, although six certainly seems excessive for the purposes of linking figures of academic, philosophical and religious interest.  Rather worryingly I can use Ayn Rand as a bridging figure between most of these (Anton LaVey notably claiming that the Church of Satan was simply Ayn Rand’s philosophy with some ritual and ceremony bolted on).

Patriarchy Rising

Just as I’d been reflecting that my feminism had been in abeyance for several months, not gone so much as displaced by concerns about ecological degradation, peak oil, species extinction etc., along comes a major kick in the gut from the U.S. It has been a while since body politics and incursions into women’s reproductive rights have provoked a visceral reaction in me, but the news that Virginia is set to become the seventh state to require women to undergo ultrasounds prior to an abortion left me reeling. See Feminist Philosophers for some discussion and commentary.

Once again the Onion has a wonderful reductio ad absurdum of this, with the proposal that women be required to paint the nursery and name the baby before undergoing an abortion. Terrifyingly, as with many Onion stories, one can imagine it being true.

There's No Tomorrow (2012)

A majestic thirty four minute animated film from Incubate Pictures.  This is undoubtedly the most concise introduction to peak oil and the limits of growth I have ever come across.  Beautifully clear and terrifying. 

In Memoriam: John Hick (1922-2012)

Dr. Yujin Nagasawa of the University of Birmingham reports the death of Professor John Hick, who died peacefully yesterday.  An influential figure in analytic philosophy of religion and a nice, humble guy too.  I had the pleasure of seeing him speak a couple of times while I was an undergraduate at Lampeter in the 1990s.  Nagasawa reports:

John was Danforth Professor of Philosophy of Religion at Claremont Graduate University and H. G. Wood Professor of Theology at the University of Birmingham. He delivered Gifford Lectures in 1986-7 and he was awarded the Grawemeyer Award for Religion in 1991. He was best known for his work on the problem of evil, religious pluralism, eschatology and Christology. He published numerous books including Faith and Knowledge, Evil and the God of Love, Death and the Eternal Life, An Interpretation of Religion, The Metaphor of God Incarnate and Between Faith and Doubt. John was also highly respected in Birmingham for his community service in the areas of civil rights and inter-faith/inter-race relations.

Disasters and Business Models

The Guardian has a nice short piece on the inability of the UK to cope with any kind of major disaster for more than a week; and by cope it means, supply food and water and maintain basic amenities.  This is the result of a number of factors, but in terms of business modelling it is part of the efficiency, 'just-in-time supply' and profit-driven logic of neoliberalism and particularly market globalisation, which has resulted in the creation of a remarkably fragile socio-economic system.  This isn't news to anyone with any level of familiarity with peak oil, the limits of growth, ecological economics etc.  However, it is certainly pleasing to see this knowledge slowly percolating into the mainstream media.  The comments are very reasonable too (no knee-jerk denialists).  I agree with several of the commentators that a week is rather optimistic; the supermarkets would probably empty within a few days; and the problem is not unique to the UK, the suburban US would be hit harder.  Unfortunately the twenty-first century will be one of resource scarcity, increasing ecological degradation and climate chaos, so there will likely be no shortage of such disruptions and disasters.  Welcome to the anthropocene and the peak of industrial civilisation, a long descent beckons. 

Octopus Cognition

A wonderful article at Orion Magazine on the consciousness and cognitive abilities of octopuses (HT Sentient Developments). 

Octopuses have the largest brains of any invertebrate. Athena’s is the size of a walnut—as big as the brain of the famous African gray parrot, Alex, who learned to use more than one hundred spoken words meaningfully. That’s proportionally bigger than the brains of most of the largest dinosaurs.

Another measure of intelligence: you can count neurons. The common octopus has about 130 million of them in its brain. A human has 100 billion. But this is where things get weird. Three-fifths of an octopus’s neurons are not in the brain; they’re in its arms.
...
“Octopuses,” writes philosopher Godfrey-Smith, “are a separate experiment in the evolution of the mind.” And that, he feels, is what makes the study of the octopus mind so philosophically interesting.

...
“I think consciousness comes in different flavors,” agrees Mather. “Some may have consciousness in a way we may not be able to imagine.”

Bees, Meditation and Biofuel

There is an interesting post by Phil Hart at The Oil Drum, inspired by Mark Magill's Meditation and the Art of Bee Keeping.  The piece explores an analogy between the production of ethanol and the creation of honey by bees. 

One calculation has it that 450g (1 lb) of honey represents visits to two million flowers.

So the next time you're spreading a teaspoon of honey on your toast, think about the visits tens of thousands of bees made to a hundred thousand flowers, just to bring you something you can devour in a couple of mouthfuls.

And the next time you put a gallon of gas in your tank, think about just how much effort and energy is required to replace it with a gallon of biofuel grown, gathered and processed from crops.

The argument is that one should, pretty much, value them similarly, although this might - albeit this is not the article's aim - entail rejecting the human use of both.