Monty Python and Philosophy, Gary Hardcastle [portable ebook reader TXT] 📗

philosophical foundations of professional ethics and the implications of intellectual property for political philosophy.

STEPHEN A. ERICKSON is Professor of Philosophy and the E. Wilson Lyon Professor of Humanities at Pomona College. He received his PhD at Yale (1964) and is author of Language and Being, Human Presence: At the Boundaries of Meaning, and The (Coming) Age of Thresholding, as well as numerous articles in journals such as The Review of Metaphysics, Man and World, Philosophy Today, The Harvard Review of Philosophy, and International Philosophical Quarterly. He lectures worldwide and, having been contacted by John Cleese in the nineties, has done public performances regarding “the meaning of life” with Cleese at several California colleges.

STEVE FAISON was introduced to Monty Python indirectly when he happened upon Fawlty Towers reruns on American Public Television and went in search of more John Cleese. Steve earned his B.A. in philosophy at the University of Colorado at Denver. He is on schedule to receive his Ph.D. in philosophy from Vanderbilt University later this year. Steve recently had his essay on Santayana published in the Santayana Society Bulletin. In the near future you can catch Steve teaching at a college or university near you.

GARY HARDCASTLE first encountered Monty Python by way of the American Corporation for Public Broadcasting and philosophy by way of the University of Pittsburgh, where he received his B.S. in psychology and the history and philosophy of science. He subsequently received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of California—San Diego and has taught philosophy at Virginia Tech, the University of Wisconsin—Stevens Point, Bucknell University, and (currently) Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania. He is the editor, with Alan Richardson, of Logical Empiricism in North America (2003) and the author of several articles in the philosophy of science and over a thousand emails.

REBECCA HOUSEL teaches writing and literature in upstate New York where Ecuadorian llamas first introduced her to Monty Python and Spam. She has contributed to Superheroes and Philosophy (2005) and Poker and Philosophy (2006). Rebecca has also published a series of five children’s novels and writes book reviews and articles for publications like Redbook and the Journal of Popular Culture. After receiving her B.A. and M.A. in English from the University of Rochester, she traveled to Sydney to complete her doctoral studies at the University of New South Wales, as well as continue her search for the elusive, yet deadly, killer rabbit.

JOHN HUSS converted to Pythonism on his twelfth birthday at a screening of Monty Python and the Holy Grail at the Colonial Twin in Pompton Lakes, New Jersey. He received his B.S. in geology from Beloit College, an M.S. in geophysical sciences and a Ph.D. in the history and philosophy of science from the University of Chicago, while rocking out with The John Huss Moderate Combo. He is currently Director of the Quantitative Skills Center at Reed College and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Portland State University.

GEORGE REISCH first glimpsed the life of the mind when, in 1977, he encountered Monty Python’s Flying Circus playing on a suburban television set that was not far from Pompton Lakes, New Jersey. His career path thus determined, he studied physics and history and philosophy of science at Bowdoin College and the University of Chicago, and then wrote How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science (2005) in a single afternoon. He likes strong coffee, occasionally teaches philosophy at Northwestern University, and edits books at Open Court Publishing Company.

ALAN RICHARDSON is Professor of Philosophy and Distinguished University Scholar at the University of British Columbia. (No, really.) He is author or editor of many, many things that have ‘logical empiricism’ in the title. When he first started watching Monty Python’s Flying Circus, the PBS station in Philadelphia showed it just before Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man. Ever since then he has felt that a properly cultured life requires a combination of comedy and history and philosophy of science. Currently, he is working with the internationally known cultural critic Lars Adrian Cohn on elimiDATE and Philosophy, which will include a special section offering advice for those on the philosophy job market.

KEVIN SCHILBRACK earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago Divinity School. A philosopher of religions, he is the editor of Thinking through Myths: Philosophical Perspectives (2002) and Thinking through Rituals: Philosophical Perspectives (2004). He teaches at Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia, the first college in the world chartered to grant degrees to women and where the students are quite unlike “wicked, bad, naughty Zoot.” His quest is to rehabilitate metaphysics as a form of rational inquiry, and his favorite color is blue. No—black!

EDWARD SLOWIK became an avid Monty Python fan in his early teens, viewing the original series on public television in Chicago during the mid-1970s. The cumulative effect of watching the show at such a tender age (he did not heed the warnings about “young or more sensitive viewers”) left him incapacitated, such that only an academic career remained open to him. He received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Ohio State University, specializing in the history and philosophy of science, especially space and time, and Early Modern philosophy. He has many publications in these areas, including Cartesian Spacetime (2002). He is Associate Professor in Philosophy at Winona State University in Winona, Minnesota.

KURT SMITH is an Assistant Professor of philosophy at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania. He earned his Ph.D. in philosophy at Claremont Graduate University. His area of specialization is early modern philosophy, which focuses on theories of perception and representation. He caught a moment of Monty Python’s Flying Circus once when he was a kid flipping through channels (very likely racing to ABC in order to get his weekly fix of The Six Million Dollar Man). He thinks he saw part of an episode once while stoned as an undergraduate as UC Irvine, but this may have been an episode of Fawlty Towers. His contribution here is pretty much the