existentialsex4

Well, it's spring time finally. And there are effing ants overtaking my room! Soo annoying. My semester is officially over, and I got all A's and one B+. Yay me! Hmm what else? I'm reading a book by the Templeton prize winner, Michael Heller. He has some brilliant ideas, in particular one is that the limits about the rationality of humans and science differ. That is to say, human reason, and the methodology of science differ; they are not the same thing. Very cool idea since human reason seems to be not only based on evidence, but also practical interests and stakes. Science seems to not take the latter two into the equation, in fact it's thought bad science to incorporate both of them into your scientific theories.

I'm thinking a lot about disability rights, and sexuality recently. In particular the social stigma that those with disabilities are thought to be "non-sexual" beings; or even the opposite of sexy. While this is clearly false, I'd like to know the general reasons behind that intuition. My fear is that it has something to do with social Darwinism; the view that disabled individuals are some how biologically inferior. While social Darwinism is largely regarded as false by most contemporary theorists about evolution, I can't help but wonder if a lot of people who are uninformed about the recent developments in evolutionary theory have bought into this idea.

Hmm what else can I say? My puppy have a hilarious game, I yell "WRESTLEMANIA!" and he comes running up to me; then we wrestle until I hold him down and he submits. It's pretty hilarious. Since we could both be doing nothing, then I scream and then it's on! hahaha.

Anyways I'm in the process of transferring my credits to my new faculty at school, hence I have so many meetings with the honours supervisor in philosophy, and the department head to verify that I have done the majority of work in my degree. Next I take my final year of classes beginning this fall, and then I write and defend my thesis. I'm still not entirely clear on what I want to write my thesis on but here are two of the ideas:

1. How contemporary ethical theories deal with disability and the good life. My intuition is that a lot of ethical theory deal rather poorly with the severely disabled, and tend to ignore the general philosophical problems that rise up when we consider the disabled. Hopefully through my studies, I can advocate the better ethical view, or maybe develop one of my own through the process.

2. I would like to study the dialogue between religion and science. Recently a lot of literature has cropped up using philosophical and metaphysical arguments for why the two conflict, I would like to investigate the arguments in detail. I'm inclined to think that the two don't necessarily conflict, but there is a little tension between some theologically motivated truth claims and scientific ones.

I'm leaning towards probably 1, since disabled rights and ethical theories are largely ignored in the current philosophical climate.