AUB Philosophy

Philosophy lost a best friend on Friday. Daniel Dennett was arguably the most important and best philosopher of recent times, a friend of AUB and of the AUB philosophy department in particular. Dennett spent some early years in Beirut and returned several times in recent years to teach seminars and speak at conferences. Dennett's experiences in Beirut are described, below, in this excerpt from his most recent book, October 2023, an autobiography entitled "I’ve Been Thinking." More on Dennett's life and accomplishments may be found in the links, below. Dennett was 82. He will be sorely missed, but celebrated for years to come.

“Years passed, Mother died, Charlotte had an adventurous career as a journalist in Beirut, and I paid a brief visit there to give a talk at AUB, during a trip to Istanbul. Would I like to spend a semester at AUB? Absolutely. All my life, I had wanted to teach there, where my father had taught and met my mother, and where I had gone to nursery school in the ’40s. (I amused my parents’ friends when they visited us and asked if I, aged four or five, went to school. “Oh yes,” I always replied. “I go to AUB.”) So in 2011 Susan and I returned to Beirut for a spring semester, and part of my preparation was to remind myself that it couldn’t be as grand an adventure as my parents’ years in the ’30s and ’40s, or even our own adventures in the ’60s. But it would still be fun. In fact the young faculty in the philosophy department and a few from other departments, mostly single and without children, adopted us immediately and took us on many adventures…

The students at AUB were intrepid and intellectually curious, and it was a joy to see young men and women from all over the Arabic-speaking world (a few women heavily veiled but others in miniskirts) learning together, living together, preparing to take their places in critical roles in their home countries as generations have done since the founding of AUB in 1866 by an American educator and missionary, Daniel Bliss. It’s a beautiful campus overlooking the Mediterranean, and even in the most terrible times during the civil war of the 1980s, when one president of the university was kidnapped and another was murdered, it has kept going, and it continues to do so, with Lebanon in desperate financial shape following the large explosion and the continuing wars in the region, with refugee camps to maintain, and intermittent failures of the national infrastructure.

I went back to AUB for a philosophy conference in 2018 and returned in June of 2022 to accept an honorary doctorate and give the keynote speech. Lebanon, Beirut, and AUB are all bravely recovering from their recent catastrophes as they have always done in the past. Watching the hundreds of young doctors and engineers and economists—and yes, even philosophers—march proudly by me with their hard-won diplomas gives me hope for the future.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/19/books/daniel-dennett-dead.html

https://dailynous.com/2024/04/19/daniel-dennett-death-1942-2024/

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2024/04/19/daniel-dennett-philosopher-atheist-darwinist/

People ask "why study philosophy?" Here are some good reasons, just posted on our website.
Why Study Philosophy?​​​​

​People study philsophy because of its enormous and enduring interest. It also nearly inescapable. All of us have to answer, for ourselves, questions about what we should believe, what we should desire, and how we should live. Philosophy students learn to ask these questions well and how to formulate possible answers to them. ​

Philosophy emphasizes foundational intellectual skills (such as the discernement of similarity and difference, the evaluation of cogency, and clarity of thought and expression) that are highly transferable and indispensable for successul intellectual inquiry generally.

General Problem Solving

Many different problems share a common structure or 'bottom out' in a common concern. Philosophy will teach you to identify those patterns​ and to analyze fundamental concepts. It will teach you to organize ideas, sort the relevant from the irrelevant, and to identify what is essential.​​

​Persuasion, Writing, and Effective Communication

In your philosophy classes you will confront difficult texts and be asked to get the bottom of them. You will be required to extract ideas from these texts, many of which will be alien to you, and you will have to analyze and evaluate them as clearly as possible in your own writing. Philosophy students learn to charitably compare contrasting viewpoints, to describe them with detail and rigour, to analyze them with clarity and depth, and hence to develop and communicate their own views as persuasively as possible.

Understanding the Wider Intellectual World

​All fields of knowledge employ reasoning and operate according to standards of evidence. Philosophers learn to examine those very tools and thus bring a valuable perspective to any field of inquiry. Moreover, each intellectual discipline has its own set of foundational concepts, and stands in its own relations to other disciplines, which bear philosophical examination.​​​​​

Philosophy Prepares You for Future Study:

​​Thinking About Graduate School?
On average over the three sections, philosophy majors are the most exceptional on the GRE.​
Thinking about Professional School?
Philosophy majors top the LSAT and are behind only physics math, and engineering students on the GMAT. Philosophers enjoy the best chance of admission to medical school of any major.

Good for something philosophy.
"The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus was the last famous Stoic philosopher of antiquity. During the last 14 years of his life he faced one of the worst plagues in European history. The Antonine Plague, named after him, was probably caused by a strain of the smallpox virus. It’s estimated to have killed up to 5 million people, possibly including Marcus himself."
The Meditations, by a Roman emperor who died in a plague named after him, has much to say about how to face fear, pain, anxiety and loss.

Stoicism in a time of pandemic: how Marcus Aurelius can help The Meditations, by a Roman emperor who died in a plague named after him, has much to say about how to face fear, pain, anxiety and loss

Interesting piece by Stephen Greenblatt.

Invisible Bullets: What Lucretius Taught Us About Pandemics The ancient philosopher contemplates our place in the material world when particles hostile to us begin to move.

Also on Feb 20 -21, Extimacy!

Upcoming events!

'What is Authority? On Authority and Related Matters'
Two seminars by Professor Mladen Dolar (University of Ljubljana)
Monday February 17 and Wednesday February 19,
12-3pm Auditorium C, West Hall
All welcome

Authority is a tricky concept. To follow Hannah Arendt – the title of the seminar is borrowed from her classical essay – what defines the proper domain of authority is a double negative: it cannot be reduced to the use of external means of coercion and violence, and on the other hand it is also irreducible to persuasion, argument and reasoning. Authority is thus exerted at the point with no proper coverage in either force or reason, yet it is not simply external to either and can be conceived at the point of their inner overlap. The traditional way of dealing with this paradoxical entity was to base authority in transcendence, and the advent of modernity was coterminous with the downfall of all traditional authorities and their reduction to immanence. Hence the predicament of modernity, the impossibility of establishing a proper authority (“authority has vanished from the modern world,” says Arendt) and the propensity to set up ersatz authorities, often with calamitous consequences. Several vocabularies can be used to circumscribe the locus of authority, and this seminar will take up some classical approaches and clues, without any ambition to be exhaustive: from La Boétie’s path-breaking manifesto on voluntary servitude (around 1550), a harbinger of modernity, to Carl Schmitt’s reflections on sovereignty, followed by Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben. We will address the very modern problem of the authority of reason that should be sustained on its own grounds, from Kant’s path-breaking set-up of the Enlightenment to the contemporary proponents continuing on that path. Finally, we will try to shed light on the problem of authority from a psychoanalytic perspective, through the lens of what Freud designated as the three impossible professions: governance, education and psychoanalysis. All three are impossible precisely because they have the problem of authority at their core, something that is impossible to sustain and at the same time something impossible to be rid of.

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The Department of Philosophy at the American University of Beirut cordially invites you to

A Job Talk for the Mohammad Atallah Chair in Ethics
Tuesday, April 9, 6:00 p.m.
College Hall conference room (314)
Candidate: Richard Dean

AI and Ethics: Autonomous Machines and Moral Autonomy

Will moral philosophy provide guidance in programming self-operating machines? Maybe…but not in the way suggested by recent discussions of self-driving cars and philosophical thought-experiments like the trolley problem. And will self-operating machines provide insights that are useful for moral philosophy? Yes, thinking about morality for machines reinforces an idea that has been proposed about moral principles, namely that genuinely moral principles must be self-imposed or recognized by oneself as binding commands.

Dr. Richard Dean is currently Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Los Angeles (CSULA). He received his BA from the University of Oregon, and an MA and PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He taught at Rutgers University for three years and at The American University of Beirut for seven years. Among his publications:
The Value of Humanity in Kant’s Moral Theory, Oxford University Press, 2006 (nominated for American Philosophical Association Book Prize, 2007)
“Neurodiversity and the Rejection of Cures,” in Disability in Practice: Attitudes, Policies, and Relationships, eds. Thomas Hill, Jr. and Adam Cureton, Oxford University Press, 2018
“Stigmatization and Denormalization as Public Health Policies: Some Kantian Thoughts,” Bioethics, vol. 28, no. 8, October 2014

Dr. Dean is interested in the history of moral philosophy, contemporary normative ethics, applied ethics, and recent empirical approaches to moral philosophy.

A talk by Jean-Gabriel Ganascia

Title: Ethical Requirements for the Design of Fair Autonomous Agents.
When: Tuesday March 26, 5:00 pm
Where: American University of Beirut: Fisk Hall, Room 309

Abstract: With the development of artificial intelligence, it is now possible to design agents that are said autonomous in the sense that their behavior results from a chain of physical causalities from sensors acquisition of signals to action without any human contribution. There are many possible applications of such agents, for instance in transportation, with autonomous cars, or in war, with autonomous weapons. Since human is not present in the loop, many fears the robots animated by such agents be predatory. In order to prevent unsafe behaviors, references to humane values have to be included in the agent programing. More technically, it means that engineers are now designing the equivalent of an "ethical controller" to restrict the robot actions according to moral criteria. At the light of the recent autonomous car accident that happened March 2018 in Arizona, we shall detail de different ethical dimensions that such a controller has to satisfy, and the technical difficulties that artificial intelligence researchers who program it are facing.

Jean-Gabriel Ganascia is Professor of Computer Science at Sorbonne University, senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France, chaiman of the COMETS (CNRS Ethical Committee), member of the LIP6 (Laboratory of Computer Science of the UPMC) where he heads the ACASA team and deputy director of the OBVIL Laboratory of Excellence (Labex) which activities are focused on the literary side of Digital Humanities. His present research activities are focused on artificial intelligence (he is an EurAI – European Association for Artificial Intelligence – fellow), symbolic data fusion, Computational Philosophy, Computer Ethics and Digital Humanities.

Sectarian Partiality: For or Against?
A philosophical debate between Dr. Bana Bashour and Dr. Bashshar Haydar.
Thursday, March 7 at 6:30PM.
The American University of Beirut
West Hall, Auditorium A.

This debate is not about sectarianism as a political system in Lebanon, but the general tendency of people to favor their ingroup members over their outgroup members. This socio-psychological tendency has moral and political implications that will be discussed at length by both professors. Dr. Bashour, a professor of moral psychology and meta-ethics, will argue against sectarian partiality while Dr. Haydar, a professor of moral political philosophy, will argue for sectarian partiality.
To RSVP: https://www.facebook.com/events/2296563633958811/

A talk from our former student, Tamara Fakhoury.