Thank you to everyone who so generously donated to Merlin during our first ever GivingTuesday campaign. Because of you we were able to raise $5,660 for philosophy in the community. Funds will help support our Winter & Spring programs! See more here!
We’re thrilled to welcome new board member Mike McGuire to our team! Mike has been a regular at our community gatherings and an amazingly dedicated volunteer for years. Learn more about Mike here!
We are grateful by the support shown to us in 2023 by the American Philosophical Association Berry Fund for Public Philosophy! Because of their $1,000 award, we were able to launch a new series called “How Did We Get here?” (as part of our philosophy shorts program). Learn more about the series and what award funds helped to support here!
Debates about “free will” crop up in a wide, wide variety of areas: In discussing law and punishment, we ask whether the defendant acted “of his own free will.” In physics and metaphysics, we wonder whether the future is fully deterministic, or whether our choices might affect the course of things. Theologians of various religious traditions ponder a variety of problems over how to reconcile human freedom with divine providence. And researchers in neuroscience and the philosophy of mind worry over the legacy bequeathed to them from Descartes: how, if at all, can the mind even be connected to the body? What, if anything, do these widely varied conversations in divergent fields have in common, besides the name “free will”? Access more here!
In this philosophy walk led by philosopher Christopher Preston we explored five core questions centered around our relationship with and conceptions of the wild. Access audio recordings and photos here!
We often take “labor” and “work” as synonyms, describing an often-difficult process that’s required to “get by” in life, or even to “make our living.” Yet there’s also a strong contrast between the demanding-yet-fulfilling “work” and drudgery, as well as other complicated dances between labor and leisure, work and recreation, action and contemplation, “liberal” and “servile” pursuits. These complications have been viewed very differently across the centuries. In this installment of “How Did We Get Here?” we explored this and then some! Access resources here!
In this installment of “How Did We Get Here?” with philosopher Ed Glowienka we considered something we all want, but can’t agree on how to get: freedom. We explored the shift between classical and Enlightenment notions of political freedom and looked at how reactions to this shift inform modern conservative and liberal values. Along the way, we did a bunch of other stuff, too, and hopefully gained a deeper appreciation of why we value freedom and of the philosophical positions underlying contemporary debates. Access photos & more here!
Most of us have the basic intuition that, because the truth “always is what it is”then there shouldn’t really be different “kinds” of knowing: we either know, or we don’t know, and that’s that. Knowledge, like truth, should be objective and invariable. Yet many of us also have another intuition: sometimes, there really does seem to be “something different” about knowing, or about acquiring knowledge, in different ways. In this workshop we applied some traditional tools, along with our own careful analytic skill, to see what we could salvage from both intuitions. We identified, as best we can, what each intuition gets right, as well as how they fit together in a coherent way. Critically, we learned to appreciate the difference between knowing, as an activity that we do, and knowledge, as a thing that we have. Access resources here!
