Introduction
Every year the Greater Philadelphia Philosophy Consortium sponsors an Undergraduate Philosophy Conference, whose main purpose is to bring together undergraduates working in philosophy to meet one another and to hear and discuss some excellent student papers. On Saturday, February 25, 2006, the annual conference was held at Drexel University in Philadelphia, co-sponsored with the Drexel University Department of English and Philosophy, and the College of Arts and Sciences. We had many specific objectives and innovations in mind as we planned the conference, including the publication for the first time of these conference proceedings on the web. I'd like to briefly describe a couple of our objectives insofar as they provide background for the essays included here.
The conference theme, "The Impacts and Implications of Technology on Life, Ethics, and Art," was chosen to reflect the significance of technology and the practical issues presented by technology in various areas of human experience that has historically been important at Drexel. We wanted to encourage submissions from students at Drexel as well as other schools at which there isn't a large philosophy program or even, in some cases, a major. We thought this theme would be broad enough to include the approaches, styles, and interests of students with different backgrounds and ideas.
We ended up with a wide range of submissions from students across the country which were sent to readers who graciously contributed their time and expertise to the project. We thought the benefits of the conference should not be limited only to those whose work would be selected to be read, but should also, as much as possible, be spread to all those who took the time and risk involved in writing an essay and sending it to a bunch of strangers to read. We asked our readers to give as much encouraging and constructive criticism as possible for each essay, so we could send each author some thoughtful, relevant, useful material to work with in developing as a writer and a thinker.
A little over thirty essays were received, read, and critiqued by our team of readers. Thanks go out again to all those who contributed their time and energy toward this effort. Of the many nice comments I have received about the conference, some of the nicest have come from students whose papers weren't selected and who didn't make it to the conference, but who had enjoyed and learned from the comments on their submission. Some of these students, I expect and hope, will be submitting improved articles to undergraduate conferences in the future!
We also arranged for each of the eight selected papers to be read by a commentator prior to the conference. The idea was that the commentator would pose one question or comment to the reader, to which he or she would respond as a manner of beginning discussion of each paper. Although one of our commentators was unable to make it for the conference, this seemed to work well. Some of the commentators' remarks were made available to me to be included in this publication, and you will find them below following some of the papers. We also invited the authors of the four papers that received acknowledgement for "honorable mention" but which were not read at the conference to submit a final version for this publication, and you will find them included below, (they appear as numbers 9-12 in the table of contents).
All authors were given the chance to edit their papers before sending me a final version for this publication. In some cases, substantial sections of papers which were eliminated from the version to be read at the conference--each reader had twenty minutes--were re-inserted. In person, the discussion period helped identify gaps that resulted where papers had been substantially shortened. I decided that, since we aren't cutting down any trees to produce this publication, it would be fine to include the longer version here even though the paper as presented at the conference was, in one case especially, a very much shorter version.
As the main organizer of the conference and editor of this publication, I want once again to thank all those who made the conference a success, and to take responsibility for any things we might have messed up on, some of which we noticed, (like ordering too little coffee and too many brownies!!), and probably a lot of others we haven't noticed. I especially thank all those who submitted articles and who attended the conference. I hope you will continue and enjoy your involvements with philosophy!
Pete Amato