Does the teleological suspension of the ethical make you weak in the knees?  Do you stay awake at night worrying about being deconstructed?  Do you think Magritte’s paintings of guys with bowlers and apples in their faces the best paintings you’ve ever seen?  Then you know it’s time for discussion and beer at Ockham’s Kegger!

Ockam’s Kegger will begin a new four-week series on Tuesday, November 3, with The Philosophy of Rock & Roll. We are delighted that Dr Jeffrey Hanson, who has a keen interest in both the music and the thought behind or implied by it, will once again be our speaker. This series promises to be tuneful and rhythmic certainly, also fascinating and fun. November 3, 10, 17 and 24, at 7:00 PM in M. J. O’Connor’s Pub, the Park Plaza Hotel.

Ockham's Kegger Manifesto

Eminent Bostonian Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, “God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please - you can never have both.” Ockham’s Kegger is designed to prove Emerson wrong. I am convinced that God would have us seek the truth, which is hard work indeed, but it can also be fun. So on Tuesday nights we do our best to pursue deeper understanding of some of life’s most profound questions in a relaxing social atmosphere.

The idea for Ockham’s Kegger came from a similar project I was part of over ten years ago. My best friend started a philosophy discussion group in the back room of a bar in the hippest part of downtown Dallas, Texas. Every Tuesday students and adults, musicians and artists, lawyers and accountants, Christians and atheists, would gather to hear a lecture and share in discussion of philosophers from Aristotle to Wittgenstein.

When my friend asked me to help him lecture, I was able to cut my teeth as a professor long before getting my first university job. Now I work at Boston College, but I find that there is still a place in my heart for teaching in an informal setting, where all ages are welcome and there is no homework!

My hope is that Ockham’s Kegger will be a chance to obey fully the first commandment to love God with our minds as well as our hearts. In so doing we also honor the uniquely human desire to understand, a desire rarely satisfied by our busy but too often narrow lives. For believers and unbelievers alike it will be a reminder that the life of faith is not alien to the life of the mind. -- Jeff Hanson

Who was Ockham, anyway, and where did he get a razor, and what's this obscure reference?

"Ockham's Kegger" is a tip o' the beer stein to Ockham's Razor, a philosophical principle attributed to the medieval scholar William of Ockham (c. 1295-1349, sometimes spelled Occam): entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, "entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity." It has nothing to do with shaving paraphernalia. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_Razor - or better yet, come to one of the Kegger sessions!