21st September 2008

There is no news.

2nd March 2008

Philosophy is to leave the Faculty of Health it seems in a University-wide shake-up. Not a moment too soon. The Faculty has been an enlightened patron of philosophy for some years, but as the Government seeks to improve the Health Service by cutting support for irrelevant things like University Health faculties, the Faculty is itself awaiting, with some apprehension, the results of tests.

Staying with health, have I announced the successful doctoring of my colleague Peter Herissone-Kelly? It was a swift and painless affair, conducted by an international panel of phenomenal Kantian scholars pierced by the pleasure of beholding a thing of beauty, their imaginations and understandings in relaxed and vigorous play.

Warmest congratulations to Peter, who will himself I'm afraid be feeling completely flat at the end of such a long term nervenibbling project.

Chris Payne tells me he has his Preston residence in Winckley Square. A big mistake! Preston's greatest scoundrels have gravitated towards Winckley Square, most notably Thomas Miller (1810-1865), the Cotton Lord of Horrockses, leader of the Preston Masters during the Great Lockout of 1853/4. I'm told you can still get mugged, but in a kinder 21st century way, if you venture carelessly across Winckley Square Gardens, apparently at any time of the day.

With my colleague Isis I sought lunch the other day in the new Media Factory. As she says, it's like Richard Rogers' Pompidou building, inside out. - Although what they say about the Pompidou building is that it's like an ordinary building inside out...

Anyway, inside the Media Building it is all show-it-like-it-is, with galvanised grids to walk on and huge pipes running up and down and across, very exciting I imagine for those that like pipes - tubes, that sort of thing - or prison-chic. Anyway, the last thing you would expect from the outside, which is soo formica. I suppose, come to think of it, it's the architecture of media spin...

Thomas Suchan and I have been planning to do a website which would ask people what they think about issues of the day and on the basis of their answers show a chart of where they stand politically and morally compared with say St Augustine and the Marquis de Sade. Now I see it's been done, in connection with the American election.

I find I haven't got a clue what is happening to our 3rd year people - they have somehow risen into more rarified atmospheres as they climb the mountain towards the Good.

Beyond the Good I gather lies the Park Hotel in Lancaster, where one of last year's star graduands, Miles Taylor, is taking over as Manager having brought self-sustaining enlightenment to the Britannia.

Professor Schroeder emails from Melbourne that Peter Singer has moved back in - next door.

And here's a problem now that I bet Preston doesn't share with Melbourne. In Preston there is no bus service direct from the train station to the University! You have to bus into the bus station, and out again from there. And to find out about this you have to go to the information desk - which is in the bus station.

We have here an example of a state of affairs that is real while at the same time logically impossible. In all possible universities there is a shuttle bus service linking town, campus and train station. Impossibility is surely something we as philosophers must seek to expose and oppose whatever the circumstances.

26th November 2007

"Philosophy graduates, once derided as unemployable layabouts, are in growing demand from employers," the Guardian tells us this week. (Education Guardian 20:11:07)

Fantastic! I think.

Great that people interested in philosophy are getting jobs, but what happens when people sign up for philosophy in order to get a job?

No, really, terrific news.

Simon Blackburn is quoted as saying people get interested in philosophy when the zeitgeist gets infected with uncertainty, and what the paper is saying is that philosophers are hired for jobs in eg 'finance, property development and 'business' . Let's hope Blackburn is wrong. The Education Guardian 20:11:07 'I think therefore I earn' (If the link is out of date, try this.)

Had the pleasure of meeting for some first year people recently, Maxx Shackleton and Nicola and one or two others. There are quite a few first year people who have been gracing my Facebook for some time now without my having had the chance to meet them. I believe it to be unbelievably NOW to do it that way round - first a Facebook 'Friend', then an old-fashioned real-time real-place encounter in the corridor. Wonderful!

I was actually attending Professor Schroeder's first year Monday lecture - a spot of what is called 'peer observation' - lecturers trying to learn from each other. Of course you can admire what someone does without being able to do it yourself, but sometimes you can pick up tips. If she had presented her material - tricks of rhetoric - as a continuous monologue it would have been very difficult to maintain interest, but turning it all into a dialogue with us (the audience), and spicing it with riddles etc made for a very successful hour.

One great difficulty in engaging with a big group in this way is that if someone offers an answer that isn't quite what you want you can easily, without meaning to, deliver a painful put-down. Not Doris. I don't think anybody said anything actually wrong in the entire hour...

Thanks to Matt Radford, the UCLAN Philosophy Society continues to enrich the cultural landscape. Facebook again seems to be working well as a meeting point .. and so I'm told is Wetherspoons...

UCLAN philosophers are working in their research time, some of them, to improve what is called 'benefit sharing'. Philosophy is less vulnerable these days to the charge of being irrelevant to real world anxieties, but still this is the front line of the battle against global exploitation, and our people are there. It is terrific to have that fight going on in our name.

Julie Lucas, who keeps the show on the road, explains in the interview on the website.

Did you see Boy A? Was he the same person?

Or Poliakoff'? He almost certainly is.

4th October 2007

Lots of new people joining us, undergrads and postgrads, proximal people and distance people: welcome everyone, and sorry I'm so late with the news.

I still haven't got a proper handle on it, due to me bad back, but here are just one or two things you should know.

First, those lovely people numbers. Peter Lucas has been bent on building up our undergraduate numbers, Isis Brook the numbers on our MA in Values and the Environment. Both are succeeding! This is very good news. We must ride the wave.

There were lots of brilliant results in July. Miles Taylor established himself as a hero of our times: running a bar and bistro with one half of his brain and getting a 1st class degree in philosophy with the other. Absolutely brilliant.

Brilliant news too about Elena (Fell): her PhD is in the bag.

The big news about Preston is that it has escaped the devastation of Summer storms and flood: as far as one can tell.

A small bit fell off the Baptist Chapel in Fishergate, it is true, but that is best understood as a minor works issue within the Almighty's Estate Maintenance programme.

To set against that small loss, the town sports a complete new building, or if you like a complete new module of our own dear Harrington building, a new building, as noted by the aspirant Annabelle Tiffin of BBC North last night, which promises to pull the teeth of a painful national problem: the shortage of dentists.

I think it's an OK building, in spite of occupying a former garden, but Isis doesn't, mostly because it does. As for David Suckling, we would like to know. The new Dentistry school is squarish like the Media Building but displays no hint of the impish lime green which makes the latter so Now.

It is now too late to wish Hayley Houghton, Mrs M, our chef de bureau, bonne chance for her wedding, which took place just before the new Semester. Here's hoping we will never have another opportunity.

Please don't talk too loudly to Peter Herrisone-Kelly, even though he has now handed in his PhD thesis. He has willed both the completion of his thesis, and a defensible understanding of Kant, for some time now and as a result his unity of apperception is almost gone.

Professor Schroeder has returned from her secondment to the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics in Melbourne. , bringing with her one of the world's leading thinkers on development ethics, Prof Thomas Pogge. He will be with us for some weeks, a great privilege for us to have him.

Prof Schroeder also brings with her spectacular success on the grant capture front, very substantial resources secured to fund research designed to build ethical infrastructure for our dealings with - to use a term from the sixties, still woefully appropriate - the dispossessed.

Your presenter has joined Facebook (no news there then) and is looking for Friends. Send him your email if you wish to be kind:

v.pratt[remove]@btinternet.com

October 2007

Oh, sorry, coming shortly!

Your hopeless presenter has done is back and this is making newscasting a bit of a pain...

V

16th April 2007

David Suckling has a terrific blog - at least I think it's terrific - much of it edging beyond my cultural reach I'm afraid. Except for the hair.

It's terrific hair.

David, I notice you don't like what I thought I loved, the new Media building. I will come round. It's just that the other new buildings are a bit worthy? Like Brook, a serious fort of a place, really good to look at from a distance, I think, but no head on it, do you think, or at least, not the appetising kind... And no atrium!

David's blog leads me to others, some of which I think I recognise. Makada, for example, though attempting some unusual camouflage by peering at her visitors somewhat quizzically from underneath a chair, must be the Makada we know and love...

Isis, like me, is scrabbling to retain her grip on the Now, thinking about innovative graffiti that have swept across Preston recently ... You may catch her faux-naive video here:

On a more traditional note may I confess my shame in only just beginning to realize what a right- thinking person was Friedrich Nietzsche.

'Kant asked himself,' says Nietzsche, 'How are synthetic judgements a priori possible? - and what really did he answer? By means of a faculty... But, is that,' asks Nietzsche, 'an answer? An explanation? Or is it not rather merely a repetition of the question? How does opium induce sleep? "By means of a ...faculty..." replies the doctor in Moliere.'

My friend Pete Rogers has a neonate website devoted to Nietzsche: good thinking.

11th March 2007

Lee Wainwright's dialogue "What is Morality" is at last in the can, as they used to say. Featuring Lee Wainwright as Hartington with Andrew Firth in the powerful supporting role of Marv it is an electrifying probe into the inner recesses of a rootless age. This is one of the earliest critical reactions:

The work will go straight to mp3 and will be available to download the moment it is released from the editing suite.

Do you know Mike Butterworth? Did you know Albert Schweitzer? Did you know Mike Butterworth knew Albert Schweitzer? Or at least met him once in the inner recesses of 20th Century colonial Africa? We are all just those six clicks away...

Did you hear about intentions? Long articulated as theoretical entities by folk psychology, intentions have finally been eyeballed by neuroscientists peering into the recesses of the brain. It is said that they will soon be able to tell what people are thinking without asking them. More exciting to me is the prospect of being able to find out what I myself am thinking without relying on the unreliable testimony of consciousness.

I notice that academic standards are plunging in Oxford, where students reading English are now assessed partly through a pre-seen examination. The aim: 'taking pressure off the final year of study and allowing students a chance to develop their ideas and conduct research, rather than trying to memorise answers and quotations.' (Oxford Today, Vol 19 No 1, p.34)

Whatever next!

Did you notice, a terrific new building beginning to appear on the West campus, lime and white and navy, a sort of champagne among the beers and ciders round about.

Doris sends news from Melbourne: she is hot, and well, thinking about utilitarianism, and in A list company.

Let me close on an enigmatic note: Niall tells me there are just two supporters of West Ham in the Centre, of which he is just the one.

2nd February 2007

Gardar must have been a busy person, because in his wake no fewer thanthree new people have joined us.

Sarah Wilson is prompting the second year group to think how ethics might be applied: if, I suppose, after looking for their Foundations for some time last semester, the group think there are any to apply.

Mark Cutter is staying out of it until April. He comes to us then from the Law department here at UCLAN and is not above applying ethics himself.

I think even taller must be Tim Rosser, tutor in Philosophy of Mind this semester, among other things, who needs to be watched. He is one of the most philosophical figures West of Bucharest.

Doris, Prof Schroeder that is to say, has gone off to Australia. For 7 months she will hold a professorial appointment at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (CAPPE) in Melbourne. It is difficult to imagine that she will ever be prepared to come back to chilly and windswept Northern Europe, but Climate Change I suppose just might come to our rescue. A long shot.

In her going-away locker-room talk Prof Schroeder explained that Matrix thinking was shortly to be applied to ranking departments for research. This would be terrific for us at UCLAN, she said, so we are all anxious to get plugged in as soon as possible.

After so much glory achieved or prospective, it is a relief to be able to report an abject failure. I had thought a bit of amateur podcasting and a few silly webpages might be enough to get me nominated by the University as a candidate for a National Teaching Fellowship. Not so! I've just had the Not this Time email from Pam Houghton.

For those who like to learn from others' mistakes I've put my failed bid on the website.

3rd January 2007

Am I in time to think: Happy New Year?

At any rate for your continuing festivities you would be right to think The Britannia Inn and your congenial host Miles Taylor.

Miles is our Miles, in his 3rd year in Preston, and The Britania is at the bottom of my road in Lancaster.

Miles provides excellent drinking here - he manages said Britannia - and excellent thinking there. An impressive double.

Jud Evans has had a paper of his accepted for delivery at a forthcoming conference of undergraduate philosophy in Cambridge. Well done!

Lee Wainwright has accepted the challenge of producing his pacy dialogue 'What is Morality?' for audio presentation. Watch this space. Or: Listen out.

We will miss Josh Larabee next semester, now returned to the States. His countryman Daniel Kiniry stays with us and may be relied upon I hope to represent with undiminished fervour what perhaps may be called his individualistic point of view.

This is perhaps to time to rub salt in the wound: did you know that the traditional Christmas was brought to the English-speaking world by a philosopher? Mill at any rate thought of him as a philosopher. It was Coleridge, and he wrote approvingly of the presents and Christmas Tree malarky he found in Germany at the turn of the 18th Century: he found that, as well as a good deal else of overwrought and upsetting Romantic sentiment.

8th December 2006

The main thing is, buns at 5 o'clock on Tuesday, more or less opposite Hayley's room, Harrington 129. Do please look in.

Do you listen to Melvyn Bragg's seminars? Usually at 9 in the morning on Thursdays, Radio 4, but of course available on the website. I heard the one an anarchism this week, not as brilliant as usual I thought, but still a clear and enjoyable introduction. And usually it really is brilliant, imho. Partly because of Bragg, partly because of the panels of experts he books: usually top people at the top of their game.

Isis didn't go to Boston after all. It was Milwaukee, and the bridge she appeared on with the aesthetician was the portal of the new extension to the Milwaukee Museum of Modern Art - appropriately enough.

There are some special UCLAN pages of advice and information for mature students. URL on the website:

http://mss.at-uclan.com/home/main/

If the new building banishing the shrubs and green to the East of Harrigton sets your teeth of edge, DON'T WORRY. It's a new dentistry school.

See you at 5 o'clock Tuesday I hope.

28th November 2006

Our new Head of Centre, Doris Schroeder is now Professor Doris Schroeder. The flowers all came out! Great news.

Warwick's big ethics book is out. A knock-out, in fact according to Alastair Gunn, and one which 'will become a classic'. 'Very ambitious, very original ... a serious and very important contribution to philosophy' says Roger Gottlieb.

Warwick Fox, A Theory of General Ethics, MIT Press, 2006.

Isis is back from Boston where there is a bridge. Picture on the website. Isis is with Emily Brady, the aesthetician.

Eva Midden is working on her PhD with us on the tensions between Multiculturalism and Feminism. She has a chapter on this theme in a forthcoming World Bioethics Yearbook. Niall Scott has one in the same volume, on 'The Importance of Altruism in Bioethics'.

Niall tells me he shared a very pleasant evening with his tutorial students recently.

Ruby's Indian restaurant on Friargate was the excellent venue, supplying a complimentary tipple by way of envoi.

The occasion celebrated Robert Nozick's birthday, the first Codex Justianus written in 529 as well as the first transmission of electricity between a hydroelectric power plant and a city: from Niagara Falls to Buffalo New York.

Probably nothing to do with the night out, or his tutees, is the fact that Niall has also just finished editing a book on monsters, which I can't really fit into this newsca...

8th November 2006

Doris Schroeder has been appointed Head of Centre following last week's interviews.

This is exceedingly good news!

She has been Acting Head during a period of terrific advance for the Centre.

Doris is taking Introduction to Philosophy for the next 6 weeks.

Wallace Heim has not been working at Preston but she is a friend of the Values and the Environment programme: so good to record she has just been awarded her PhD in Social Action Art.

The Philosophy Research Seminar is being given by Daniel Star from Oxford in Virtue Ethics - or rather After Virtue Ethics. Sounds promising to me...

Thursday 9th October 3.30 - 5.30 Brook Room 8.

Lloyd Strickland, who taught some of us last year, has just produced his second book, a collection of his original translations of letters and papers by Leibniz.

I reported last time that our MA people encountered great hostility from the automatic registration software. Overseas visitors have now reported the same difficult experience. What paper does the programme read, I wonder? The Daily Mail?

Bumped into James Mitton the other day. He got his rather brilliant degree in Philosophy with us last Summer. We could do with seeing more of him - and maybe we will. If you get the chance, persuade him to come and do postgrad work with us instead of trying to find meaning in Blackpool (where he is staying with his brother).

Finally do please note that my brother gets a great mention in Michael Palin's Diaries, now piled high in the bookshops.

27th October 2006

The Centre is to have a new Head in place shortly, if all goes well. Interviews are to be conducted this week.

The interregnum has been overseen by Doris Schroeder as Acting Head, and during this time teaching has been supported like never before and grant capture has exploded in spectacular fashion. A hard act to follow!

Coincidentally, Gardar is moving on to Manchester next semester. Fortunately he is able to retain his research links but we will miss him.

Thanks to him, I suppose as a kind of leaving present in reverse, there is funding to send three Bioethics MA students to a one day workshop in Iceland on ethical and legal issues in pharmacogenomics. A project working on "The Ethics of Genetic and Medical Information" is the sponsor.

The automated registration system has proved a nightmare for people joining the MA in Values and the Environment, but it looks as though there are a total of eight survivors.

Congratulations, and welcome. You deserve your Masters without further ado.

For a lot of you it's essay time and a reminder that Lorna - Lorna Smithers, student rep - is giving a workshop on squeezing out those extra marks:

ARCHIVE

19th October 2006

Hi

I think this could be a podcast.

In case it is, here are some items of information for you, just to give you the merest hint of what technology makes possible in these exciting times.

I can tell you for example that friend and colleague Niall Scott is big in Education Guardian this week, head to head with London's finest, columnist and political philosophy Professor Jonathan Wolff. Niall says we should work towards a globally agreed code of research ethics. The paper prints their exchange of emails.

From the same corridor, Isis Brook, prepares, even as this newscast careers towards its deadline, for a trip to Boston, stateside, where she will explain what's nice about the gnomes on the bottom of Wastwater.

Jed Evans' philosophy website goes from strength to strength. Lots of classical texts there as well as lots of commentary. Visiting is bound to be to your advantage. Jed is now in the second year of his degree with us.

Evans experimentalism and uncoupling the copula (http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/index.htm)

You might like to know

The Masters programme in Values and the Environment which has had a very successful run in Lancaster in recent years has now transferred to UCLAN. Staff have come and gone in both places, in some cases from one to the other, so that Philosophy and Professional Ethics here at UCLAN is now the natural home of this unusual and generally terrific programme.

At the beginning of the Semester there was a sort of grand moot to celebrate the relaunch with lots of people with all sorts of connections with the programme, then and now, sharing cake and cheese and crack.

A great afternoon!

If you want to know more, Isis is the person.

If you want to know less, it's too late.

BUT mostly this is to say: give us your mp3 files, dear people, or things I can read out, or pics, so we can push philosophy at UCLAN just that little bit further into cyberspace, which after all is the realm of the pure idea.

VP
19:10:06