You’ve Got Another (Academic) Thing Coming

Passover and Easter are coming up, signifying events of cosmic significance: Easter heralds the Resurrection, Passover the Jews’ exodus from bondage in Egypt. Customarily, both holidays betoken the coming of spring, at least in the Northern Hemisphere. But most importantly of all, both days bring glad tidings of …wait for it…yes, the height of the academic conference season. April showers bring May flowers, but April’s conference presentations bring next season’s peer-reviewed publications. “April is the cruelest month, breeding/Manuscripts out of the dead land….”

Anyway, with that preface, I’m happy to announce the schedule for the Ninth Annual Conference of the Felician Institute for Ethics and Public Affairs. It’ll take place all day, Saturday, April 25 at Felician’s Rutherford, New Jersey campus (223 Montross Ave, Rutherford NJ, 07070). The plenary speaker is James Stacey Taylor of The College of New Jersey, defending the idea of markets in political votes. As usual, we’re fielding twenty papers this year–two sessions on meta-ethics, one on well-being and related issues, two on moral psychology, two on social/political philosophy, one on virtue ethics, one on bioethics, and one (for lack of a better description) on ethics and literature (featuring papers on Proust and Kierkegaard). Come by if you’re in the area; I’m hoping to post some of the papers online before the conference so that you can take a look even if you can’t make it to the conference itself.

While I’m in announcement mode, I thought I’d mention some PoT-head doings that the doers are too bashful to brag about on their own (or on her own, as it may be). Shawn Klein of Rockford College has just announced the imminent publication of an edited collection, Steve Jobs and Philosophy: For Those Who Think Different, from Open Court. Occasional PoT-head Carrie-Ann Biondi has a paper among sixteen others in there, called “Counter-Culture Capitalist” (which I’ve read in manuscript and rather like). As it happens, Carrie-Ann is speaking this Thursday (April 2) at Rockford College on a somewhat similar topic, “Mike Rowe and Ayn Rand: Somebody’s Gotta Do It“; the talk is sponsored by the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship at Rockford.

While I’m singing Carrie-Ann’s praises, I may as well mention her (rather pugillistically titled) discussions of Marx, MacIntyre, and Rawls in “Three Enemies of Capitalism,” Parts I and II, which began life as a pair of lectures at The Atlas Society’s 2014 Atlas Summit. Here’s the first lecture, and here’s the second.

Finally, Roderick Long is announcing a Call for Abstracts for a Molinari Society session on “Police Abuse: Solutions Beyond the State” at the APA’s Eastern Division Meeting, due date May 18.  Of course, I couldn’t possibly announce a CFA on that topic and not cap it off with something like this….

You might as well begin to put some abstracts in your life.