Intelligent Design Theory claims that recently discovered adaptive features of organisms are
strong evidence for the existence of an intelligent designer. Even though ID theorists discuss new examples (for example, the biochemistry of blood coagulation) and do not explicitly mention God, the logic of their argument is the same as the logic of the Design Argument, which is a traditional argument for the existence of God. In this talk I’ll present what I think is the strongest version of the Argument from Design and then describe what I think the argument’s fatal flaw is.

Elliott Sober is internationally recognized as a leading philosopher of biology and philosopher of science. Sober has published the following important books in these fields: SIMPLICITY; THE NATURE OF SELECTION; RECONSTRUCTING THE PAST; PHILOSOPHY OF BIOLOGY; FROM A BIOLOGICAL POINT OF VIEW; UNTO OTHERS; and ADAPTATIONISM AND OPTIMALITY. In addition, Sober has published the anthologies CONCEPTUAL ISSUES IN EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY; RECONSTRUCTING MARXISM; and over 200 scholarly articles and book chapters, along with his very popular textbook CORE QUESTIONS IN PHILOSOPHY.

Sober has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has held grants from NEH, NSF, ACLS, The National Research Council, and has received many other honors and awards. In addition to teaching at Wisconsin, he has held visiting appointments at Harvard, Stanford, Michigan, the London School of Economics, the University Vienna, and the University of Otago, New Zealand.

Some of the most important contributions to philosophy in the last few centuries have come from non-philosophers. Darwin's contributions, for instance, are truly fundamental: his great idea provides new foundations for the theory of meaning, and thereby indirectly secures a better understanding of fundamental concepts in ethics and epistemology.

Daniel C. Dennett, the author of Freedom Evolves (Viking Penguin, 2003) and Darwin's Dangerous Idea (Simon & Schuster, 1995), is University Professor and Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, and Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He lives with his wife in North Andover, Massachusetts, and has a daughter, a son, and a grandson. He was born in Boston in 1942, the son of a historian by the same name, and received his B.A. in philosophy from Harvard in 1963. He then went to Oxford to work with Gilbert Ryle, under whose supervision he completed the D.Phil. in philosophy in 1965. He taught at U.C. Irvine from 1965 to 1971, when he moved to Tufts, where he has taught ever since, aside from periods visiting at Harvard, Pittsburgh, Oxford, and the Ecole Normal Superieure in Paris.

His first book, Content and Consciousness, appeared in 1969, followed by Brainstorms (1978), Elbow Room (1984), The Intentional Stance (1987), Consciousness Explained (1991), Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995), Kinds of Minds (1996), and Brainchildren: A Collection of Essays 1984-1996 (MIT Press and Penguin, 1998). He co-edited The Mind's I with Douglas Hofstadter in 1981. He is the author of over two hundred scholarly articles on various aspects on the mind, published in journals ranging from Artificial Intelligence and Behavioral and Brain Sciences to Poetics Today and the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.

He gave the John Locke Lectures at Oxford in 1983, the Gavin David Young Lectures at Adelaide, Australia, in 1985, and the Tanner Lecture at Michigan in 1986, among many others. He has received two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Science. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1987.

The current movement for standards and accountability may be designed to discredit the public schools and pave the way for privatization of education. Is privatization a threat to our democracy?

Nel Noddings is past president of the Philosophy of Education Society and of the John Dewey Society. In addition to thirteen books, she is the author of some 200 articles and chapters on various topics ranging from the ethics of care to mathematical problem solving. Her latest books are Starting at Home: Caring and Social Policy (University of California Press), Educating Moral People: A Caring Alternative to Character Education (Teachers College Press), and Happiness and Education (Cambridge University Press), 2003.