Objects and Arrows

Tomorrow evening (April 25th) 5-8pm I’ll be the speaker in the seminar on Domination in Organization at UACJ in Ciudad Juarez.   The topic will be sortition as an alternative to current kinds of representative democracy.  I’m strongly in favor of sortition and will argue for it tomorrow.  The venue is the central library at UACJ, the Autonomous University of Juarez, which is located at the social sciences campus (ICSA).  The room, which is called “Sala Dual”, is at the entrance of the library to the right.  This talk will be in English, with Spanish simultaneous translation.  It’s open to the public and of course it’s free.

I’ll be talking about problems that arise when we try to aggregate preferences (Arrow’s theorem and the like) and will try to explain why I think random sampling of representatives from the general population makes sense as an alternative to the current models of representative democracy.  This is a first shot at trying to say something meaningful about sortition.

Haven’t been posting to this blog due to a very heavy work schedule over the past few months.  The good news is that Paco Calvo and I have nearly finished editing The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Psychology (we’re still waiting on one last contributor to send us his chapter) and we hope to have the book out very soon.  This has been a mammoth project.

This Friday I’ll be presenting to the neuphi group at BU.  I’m looking forward to seeing lots of old friends and colleagues.  The topic is pain and I’ll post some slides shortly.