Onlife

THE PHILOSOPHY OF COMPUTER GAMES INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE IN OSLO 2009 August 13-15, 2009 Keynote speakers: Kendall Walton, author of "Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts" (Harvard University Press, 1990), Miguel Sicart, author of "The Ethics of Computer Games" (The MIT Press, 2009) and Grant Tavinor, author of "The Art of Video Games" (Wiley-Blackwell, forthcoming in October 2009). CALL FOR PAPERS We hereby invite scholars in any field who take a professional interest in the phenomenon of computer games to submit papers to the international conference "The Philosophy of Computer Games 2009", to be held in Oslo, Norway, on August 13-15, 2009. Accepted papers will have a clear focus on philosophy and philosophical issues in relation to computer games. They will also attempt to use specific examples rather than merely invoke "computer games" in general terms. We invite submissions focusing on, but not ...

I have now completed the two projects for Oxford University Press. One is a small book, entitled Information , written for OUP popular series Very Short Introductions . The other is the book I had been writing for ten year: The Philosophy of Information . It will also be published by OUP. Next project: the other book that complements PoI : Information Ethics . Hopefully it will not take me another decade.

The Department of Science Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark ( http://www.ivs.au.dk ) invites applications for a permanent position as Associate Professor beginning January 1, 2010. The Department of Science Studies forms part of the Faculty of Science, and is responsible for research and education in history and philosophy of science. The Department seeks a historian or philosopher of mathematics and/or computer science with significant publications and research interest within the fields of history and philosophy of mathematics and computer science broadly conceived. The requirements for a successful application are an strong record of research and teaching within history and/or philosophy of mathematics and computer science, and the ability to teach in English or Danish. Experience with academic administration and fund raising is desirable. Duties will include instruction at the undergraduate and postgraduate level within the fields of history and philosophy of mathematics and comp...

A one screen summary, just click on the title. The text, based on my writings, is courtesy of Paul B. Davis.

A very nice book, which I had meant to read since a long time ago. Slightly oldish, it is clear, well written, balanced, accessible and reasonable. The reasonableness is not to be underestimated. There are plenty of crazy, insane, mad, or otherwise ready for the asylum authors out there who will take the "technological discourse" as an excuse to vent platitudes, dispense oracular wisdom, and mumble non-sensical claims. If it were for them, not only we would still be living in the caves, which might still be an uncomfortably acceptable option, but we would still be listening to the local sibyls and magicians, and this is certainly not an improvement.

Inspiring, and it does indeed apply very well to philosophy (as it was suggested by Steve Clark on philos-l): "This is a paper by Mark Edmunson in the Chronicle of Higher Education. It's about literary texts, but with some clear relevance to philosophical texts as well." One may have reservations: what happens to literature (or indeed philosophy), once you're no longer young? Becoming who you are is an endless work in progress, but the point of the article seems to be that there is a stage when most of this work in progress is actually done and that then is when literature/philosophy can play a role. It seems like a Gaussian: texts begin by being irrelevant and end by being irrelevant, peaking in your youth. This is notthe case, or the common practice of re-reading would be meaningless. And why listening to the professors, when you can read the masters? It is not true that they own the keys to the warehouse.

AHRC-funded Postdoctoral Research Fellow Department of Philosophy School of Humanities University of Hertfordshire • Salary: UH6 • Grade: £24,877-£29,704 • Ref Number: EN8899 We invite applications for the position of Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Philosophy, to work on the project “The Construction of Personal Identities Online”. The position is full-time, fixed term (18 months). The project is funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). The principal investigator is Professor Luciano Floridi. The aim of the project is to investigate the construction of personal identities (PI) when they are digitally mediated, that is, when individuals are embedded in virtual environments that provide unprecedented affordances and different constraints for PI development, as well as innovative opportunities of interactions with other agents, both human and artificial. For further information about the project, please visit http://www.philosophyo...

The story goes that when the Roman horsemen first saw Pyrrhus’ twenty war elephants, at the battle of Heraclea (280 BC), they were so terrorised by these strange creatures, which they have never seen before, that they galloped away and the Roman legions lost the battle. Today, the new elephants are electronic. The phenomenon might have just begun to emerge in the public debate but, in post-informational societies, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are increasingly shaping armed conflicts. In terms of conventional military operations, ICTs have revolutionized communications, making possible complex new modes of field operations. Of course, ICTs have also made possible the swift analysis of vast amounts of data, enabling the military, intelligence and law enforcement communities to take action in ever more timely and targeted ways. But even more significantly, battles are nowadays fought by highly mobile forces, armed with real-time ICT devices, satellites, battlefield se...