Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Sciences, Dept of Philosophy

Post Doctoral Research Officer

Salary:   From £31,311 – £38, 391 per annum inclusive (pay award pending)

The Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science is seeking to appoint a three year research officer in the Templeton Project, ‘God’s Order, Man’s Order and the Order of Nature’ from 30 September 2010. The post holder will have the exciting opportunity to work within an international team of experts in history-and-philosophy of science and theology from LSE, Oxford and UCSD and play a key role in advancing research at the interface of those fields.   Established competence in one of these areas is required, as well as evidence of ability in both.

Candidates should have a PhD and will be required to conduct project research both independently and in a team, contribute to the intellectual agenda of project activities, maintain research relations with the project team and write up research for publication in a variety of modes, including peer-reviewed journals and/or a book and non-academic venues.

Full application details can be obtained at www.lse.ac.uk/jobsatLSE.  If you cannot download the forms, email hr.recruit.res@lse.ac.uk or call 0207 955 7859 quoting reference RES/09/11.

Applications must be received by 5:30 pm by 16 December 2009

The Society for Continental Philosophy and Theology is proud to announce the Politics of Peace Conference to be held on April 16th-17th, 2010 at Messiah College in Grantham, PA.

Keynote Speakers:

• Catherine Keller (Drew University)
• William T. Cavanaugh (University of St. Thomas)

Call for Papers:
SCPT’s 2010 conference will focus on PEACE. We invite papers that examine the many dimensions of peace from social, political, religious, scientific, theological, and philosophical points of view. We also seek papers dealing with complementary topics such as justice, reconciliation, forgiveness, and peace-making, and that deal with the practical aspects of the above topics. SCPT is an organization that seeks to promote inquiry at the intersection of philosophy and theology, through the study of phenomenology, deconstruction, feminism, Radical Orthodoxy, and other related fields.

Only complete papers with a maximum of 3,000 words will be accepted. Papers should be prepared for blind review and sent to peacestudies@messiah.edu.

Deadline – February 8th, 2010
The Society for Continental Philosophy and Theology seeks to promote inquiry at the intersection of philosophy and theology. For more information about SCPT, visit www.scptonline.org.

I was saddened to hear of the news of the death of William P. Alson, September 13, 2009. News came to me via an announcement in an Evangelical Philosophical Society news bulletin, October 6.

I’ve known of his role and place in the Society of Christian Philosophers since my first trip to Wheaton College for the Annual Philosophy Conference in 1992, my first year of teaching at Bethel College, St. Paul, Minnesota. His work in philosophy of language and perception was so centrally important to the project of “giving a reason for the hope within,” that I knew I had to include some of his papers in my first anthology, Philosophy of Religion, An Anthology of Contemporary Views (Jones and Bartlett/Wadsworth), which also appeared in a Chinese edition in 1996. The essays I included are: “Religious Experience and Religious Belief,” “The Inductive Argument from Evil and the Human Cognitive Condition,” “Divine Foreknowledge and Alternative Conceptions of Human Freedom.”

His “being absent from the body and present with the Lord,” means a tremendous loss to the practice of apologetics in the West, and now the East. He was a presenter here in China at the first gathering of the Society of Christian Philosophers, at Peking University, the fall term, 1994. For that first meeting in China, I had picked a dream team of Christian philosophers. While it was his only visit, from that time on his work has become known among those who give attention to the best in scholarship. Since our first meeting at Wheaton, that fall of 1972, he impressed me as a very warm-hearted, wholly-committed Christian, with a giftedness recognized on the highest levels in the practice he loved so well.

His life will be missed, but his legacy through his writings so well-known in the Western world and now in Asia, will live on long into the future.

I regret that I could not attend his memorial service, but I do know that the spirit of his life and writings are very much present here. He was eminently a model of “being ready to make a defense to anyone who asks for an accounting of the hope within with gentleness and reverence.”

Melville Y. Stewart
Visiting Philosopher
Tsinghua University Beijing, China
stemel03@yahoo.com

William Payne Alston, 87, died September 13, 2009, at the Nottingham Residential Health Care Facility in Jamesville, New York.  He was born November 29, 1921 in Shreveport, Louisiana.

In 1942, Bill received a Bachelor of Music degree from Centenary College.  During WWII, he served in an Army Band stationed in California.  While in the service, he became interested in philosophy, and after his discharge from the Army, he entered the Graduate Program in Philosophy at the University of Chicago.  His Ph.D. work led to a position at the University of Michigan, where he taught philosophy for twenty-two years and established himself as an important American philosopher.  He then moved to Rutgers University and, later to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  In 1980 he joined the faculty at Syracuse University where he completed his fifty-year career teaching and writing about philosophy. He was best known for his work in the philosophy of language, epistemology, and the philosophy of religion.  He published several books and over 150 articles. His many Ph.D. students play a major role in philosophy today. He was founding editor of the journals Faith and Philosophy and Journal of Philosophical Research.

Bill received the highest honors of his profession. He has been President of the Central Division American Philosophical Association, the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, and the Society of Christian Philosophers. His international travel included trips to the Vatican as part of an eight-year project on God’s Actions in the World in the Light of Modern Science, sponsored by the Vatican Observatory.  He was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and he received Syracuse University’s Chancellor’s Award for Exceptional Academic Achievement.

He is survived by his wife of 46 years, Valerie Alston; a daughter, Ellen (John) Donnelly of Wayne, NJ and grandchildren, Patrick & Anna Donnelly; step-children, Marsha (Gary) Dysert of Charlotte, NC, James (Nancy) Barnes of Toledo, OH, Kathleen (Blair) Person of Troy, MI; four step-grandchildren and three great step-grandchildren.

A memorial service will be held at St. Paul’s Cathedral on November 2, 2009 at 11:00 a.m.  Fairchild & Meech are in charge of arrangements. Click here to read an obituary published in the Syracuse Post Standard on September 20, 2009.

In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral, 310 Montgomery Street, Syracuse, N.Y. 13202.

April 29-May 1, 2010

“Thinking in Public: Christian Philosophers as Public Intellectuals”

Location – Prince Conference Center at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, MI

Plenary speakers:

• Jean Bethke Elshtain (University of Chicago)
• Matthew Halteman (Calvin College)

Philosophers have often played a role as public intellectuals and social critics, reaching beyond the guild to speak to wider sectors of society. While the philosophical academy is an important “public,” philosophical research can also serve a wider public. The past century provides a plethora of examples of philosophers who have engaged in cultural conversations as public intellectuals: from Bertrand Russell and Hannah Arendt to Richard Rorty, Cornel West, and Charles Taylor. We find philosophers writing not just for Mind and Nous but also the New York Review of Books and The National Review.

This concern for other “publics” is both amplified and specified for Christian philosophers. As Alvin Plantinga observed in his inaugural address, “Advice to Christian Philosophers,” Christian philosophers “are the philosophers of the Christian community; and it is part of their task as Christian philosophers to serve the Christian community.” This impinges not only on the questions we ask, but the audiences we address. As Plantinga concludes, “The Christian philosopher does indeed have a responsibility to the philosophical world at large; but his fundamental responsibility is to the Christian community, and finally to God.”

This conference encourages Christian philosophers to re-value the importance of “public intellectual work”—both for the wider society as well as the more specific “public” of the church. Our keynote speakers provide examples of such work. Jean Bethke Elshtain is a widely-cited commentator on contemporary politics, including issues of war and justice. Matthew Halteman is an emerging expert on issues of animal ethics and has written an important booklet for the Humane Society of the United States.

Call for Papers

While the Central Region of the Society of Christian Philosophers welcomes papers on any topic of interest to Christian philosophers, for the 2010 meeting we especially encourage papers that intersect with the theme of “Christian philosophers as public intellectuals.” Papers should be of such length as to be presentable in 30 minutes or less. We will also entertain proposals for panel sessions involving up to three panelists with a respondent. Proposals for panels should include an overview of the theme of the panel and a brief summary of each panelist’s contribution. All submissions should be suitable for blind review, and include a 150-word abstract containing the author’s name and affiliation as he or she would like it to appear on the program.

Electronic submissions are preferred, and should be sent to seminars@calvin.edu. The deadline is January 8, 2010. Notification of acceptance will be sent by February 5, 2010.

Calvin College conference page: http://www.calvin.edu/scs/2010/conferences/SCP.html

The 2009 Western Conference of the Society of Christian Philosophers hosted by Fort Lewis College Durango, Colorado will take place October 22nd-24th, 2009.

Plenary Speakers:

• Michael Bergmann (Purdue University): “Commonsense Skeptical Theism”.
• Wes Morriston (University of Colorado): “My Ways Are Not Your Ways: Human Cognitive Limitations and Divinely Authorized Genocides in the Hebrew Bible”.

Click here to download the conference program as a PDF file.

Papers on any topic of philosophical interest will be considered. The SCP welcomes participation from both Christians and non-Christians as presenters, commentators, and participants. Submissions should be 3,000 words or less, prepared for blind review, and saved in an accessible format (hard copy sumbissions will not be accepted). Please indicate in your cover letter whether, should your paper not be accepted, you would be willing to serve as a commentator. For further information on both conference details and Durango attractions, visit the conference website at: http://philosophy.fortlewis.edu/scp.html

Deadline for submission: August 15, 2009. Send submissions and requests to comment to Justin McBrayer

St Mary’s College, University of St Andrews is pleased to announce its third conference on Scripture and Christian Theology: Genesis and Christian Theology – July 14th-18th, 2009.

Since the first conference on the Gospel of John in 2003, the St Andrews conferences have been recognized as one of the most important occasions when biblical scholars and systematic theologians are brought together in conversation about a biblical text. The conferences aim to cut through the megaphone diplomacy or the sheer incomprehension that so often marks attempts to communicate across our disciplines. We invite you then to join us and some of the best theological and biblical minds in careful and often lively interaction about one of the most theologically generative of biblical books: the book of Genesis. Continue Reading

Click here to download a PDF of the official conference program for Science and Human Nature: Russian and Western Perspectives – An International Symposium held at Baylor University, November 6th-8th, 2008.

The program contains links to QuickTime .mov files of the conference presentations. Enjoy!

The conference was sponsored by: The John Templeton Foundation, Society of Christian Philosophers, Baylor University Philosophy Department, Baylor Institute of Faith and Learning, Office of the Provost, Baylor University, College of Arts and Sciences, Baylor University