2013 Schedule

• Thursday, February 7: Have the Humanities Lost their Way?
  Location: St. Brendan’s Inn (234 S. Washington St., Green Bay), 7:00-8:30
  Moderator: Christopher Martin, PhD (UW Green Bay)

  Have the Humanities lost their way? It was the Humanities, you’ll recall, that brought us the notion of a liberal arts education. An education, the notion went, was directed specifically at the strengthening or betterment of our intellectual and emotional lives. This emphasis has over the years filtered into non-Humanities disciplines. Is this a good thing for our students, or have we lost something in the process? We’ll discuss the role of the Humanities in today’s institutions of higher learning, asking what if anything they alone have to offer, whether this is a Good or not, and how we might work to implement (or not) whatever alterations we might have in our course.

• Thursday, March 7: Science and the Big Questions
  Location: Kavarna (143 North Broadway, Green Bay), 7:00-8:30
  Moderator: Kaija Mortensen, PhD (St. Norbert)

  In this café we will consider what role the results of scientific studies should play in answering the "big questions" of human existence – questions about knowledge, consciousness, free will, and moral responsibility. Philosophers draw a distinction between descriptive and normative questions. Descriptive questions ask how things in reality are. Normative questions ask how things ought to be. Some philosophers warn us against drawing normative conclusions from descriptive facts. Yet, philosophers are incorporating scientific results (even running their own experiments in some cases) into their philosophical work at an ever increasing rate. In what ways does this trend help or hinder the ability of philosophers to illuminate our understanding of ourselves as humans?

• Thursday, April 4: The Extended Mind Thesis: How Large Am I Really?
  Location: St. Brendan’s Inn (234 S. Washington St., Green Bay), 7:00-8:30
  Moderator: Eric Hagedorn, PhD (St. Norbert)

  Traditionally, it's been thought that human minds would have to be either immaterial souls or material brains (or perhaps brains plus nervous systems). But it's been recently suggested by Andy Clark and David Chalmers that our minds might in fact be far larger material objects than we ever suspected: given a common understanding of what counts as a mental state, it's not unreasonable to think that our smartphones, our computers, and perhaps even other human beings can legitimately be parts of our own minds. We'll spend some time discussing the reasons Clark and Chalmers give for their thesis, and then turn our attention to some of the implications if they're right. Does having a smartphone as part of my mind make me a cyborg? Have we already greatly surpassed the biological limitations on mentality, thus making us somehow "transhumans"? Or are our increasingly diffuse minds making us somehow less than human?

• Thursday, May 2: Personal Responsibility in an Age of Mental Illness
  Location: Harmony Café (1660 W Mason St., Green Bay), 7:00-8:30
  Moderator: Angela Bauer, PhD (UW Green Bay)

  Overview coming soon…

For more information, you may contact either Leanne Kent at St. Norbert College at or Christopher Martin at UWGB.