Welcome to Charles Dunlop’s Home Page

I am David M. French Professor Emeritus and professor emeritus of philosophy, having formerly taught in the Philosophy Department at the University of Michigan-Flint. This Web page is an amalgam of professional information and personal interests. For more on the former (CV, etc.) click here. Or, if you prefer the miscellany, start with the Quote of the Moment or the current Philosophical Photo.

If you’re interested in making a no-cost contribution to help feed the world’s hungry people, please visit The Hunger Site, which donates free food with a click of your mouse. (Be sure to return to this page afterwards by using your browser’s “Back” button).

Breaking News . . . Pastafarianism – the new alternative to “intelligent design theory” is rapidly gaining a world-wide following. I am proud to announce that I have provided an endorsement of this position, which you can find more fully described on the website http://venganza.org/.

Hot Links

·        Photos I took in Greece During the Spring of 2002

Cognitive Science

·       ·David Chalmers’ Consciousness Page

·       ·CogPrints Archive (rich and ever-growing source of on-line CogSci articles)

·       ·Duke University Center for Cognitive Neuroscience

·       ·MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

·       ·Alan Turing Home Page

·       ·Yahoo Cognitive Science Search

·       ·Yahoo Philosophy of Mind Resources

Philosophy Resources

·       American Philosophical Association

·       Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

·       Philosophy Graduate School Rankings 2014-2015

·       Philosophy on the Internet Guide

·       Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Computers & Society

·       ACM SIGCAS (Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computers and Society)

·       Center for Democracy and Technology

·       CPSR (Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility)

·       EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation )

·       EPIC (Electronic Privacy Information Center)

·       Risks Forum / A premier E-journal edited by the redoubtable Peter Neumann

·       Women in Computing

o   The Ada Project (Yale)

o   Internet for Girls (large site; note "Computing" sub-heading

o   Getting Girls Interested in Computer Science (many useful links)

Fun Stuff

·       Bluegrass music aficionados may want to check out a few cool web sites:

1.     BluegrassCountry.org (music over the Internet)

2.     Bluegrass Guitar (if your instrument has six strings, you need to check this out)

3.     Bluegrass on the Tube (great search engine for bluegrass on YouTube)

4.     Banjo Hangout (cornucopia for 5-string pickers)

5.     Banjo Newsletter (Hub Nitchie’s legacy carries on!)

6.     Bluegrass Unlimited Magazine (the original, and still the best)

7.     County Sales (extensive inventory of recordings; auctions of old albums, etc.)

8.     Elderly Instruments (new & used instruments, CDs, supplies. Located in Michigan; known world-wide)

9.     Flatpicking Guitar Magazine (the name says it all)

10.  Fred Bartenstein’s Bluegrass Site (now one of the old-timers; lots of good links)

11.  Folkways Records (treasure trove, now preserved by the Smithsonian)

12.  iBluegrass (online magazine)

13.  John Hartford (great site – much more than Hartford featured here)

14.  Mandolin Cafe (great for four, five, and six-string pickers too)

15.  Martin Guitar Company (enough said)

16.  Rounder Records (complete catalog on-line)

17.  Earl Scruggs’ Web Page (visit the bluegrass banjo master)

18.  Web Ring (fantastic index to over 200 bluegrass Web sites)

·       Book-lovers, try the following:

1.     Advanced Book Exchange (excellent search engine for second-hand books)

2.     Bookfinder (similar to above)

3.     Books-a-Million (often better discounts than Amazon)

4.     Blackwell’s Books (the British granddaddy of booksellers)

5.     Daedalus Books (great prices on publishers’ remainders)

6.     Goodreads (a nice place to review books and connect with other bibliophiles)

7.     Powell’s Bookstore (one of the best / new & used selections)

·       Bizarre and / or Humorous:

1.     Dilbert Home Page (needs no introduction)

2.     MIT Hacks (yes, humor and creativity can still sometimes be found in academe)

3.     Michael Frayne’s Parody of Wittgenstein

4.     NormalBobSmith (don’t go here if you are conservative or easily offended)

Recommended Novels (see my reviews on Goodreads for a more recent list)

·       Sherman Alexie, Reservation Blues. (Robert Johnson meets Native America, by the screenwriter of Smoke Signals.)

·       Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine. (You don’t know what “anal-compulsive” means until you read this one.)

·       Charles Baxter, The Feast of Love. (Acutely drawn and memorable characters whose lives intertwine in Ann Arbor.)

·       Louis de Bernières, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. (Beautiful, expansive novel centered around life on a Greek island during WWII.)

·       Sylvia Brownrigg, The Metaphysical Touch. (Philosophy, cyberspace, appearance/reality. What more do you want?)

·       John Casti, The Cambridge Quintet. (Dinner with C.P. Snow, Alan Turing, J.B.S. Haldane, Erwin Schrödinger, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.)

·       Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides. (Forget the film version, and go with the book instead.)

·       Charles Dickens, Hard Times. (Utilitarianism meets 19th century industrial England.)

·       Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex. (Set mostly in Detroit, this is a wonderfully sympathetic and compelling exploration of gender identity through the eyes of a “5-Alpha-Reductase Pseudohermaphrodite”.)

·       Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated. (Dazzling tragicomedy debut novel in which the “author” searches for his European family roots.)

·       Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain. (Homer’s Odyssey updated in fine style to the American Civil War period.)

·       Allegra Goodman, Intuition.  (Science, personalities, and politics converge in a cancer research laboratory.  Accurate and gripping.)

·       Keri Hulme, The Bone People. (Extraordinary debut novel by New Zealand Maori author.)

·       James Hynes, The Lecturer’s Tale. (A politically incorrect satire on academic life in the age of Postmodernism, with a little Gothic horror thrown in.)

·       Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day. (Elegant, understated, and affecting account of life’s opportunities missed, told from the perspective of a “dignified” butler.)

·       A. L. Kennedy, Original Bliss. (Abused housewife meets onanistic shrink, described in spare but evocative prose.)

·       Nicole Krauss, The History of Love. (Excellent debut novel, written by either by Krauss, Leo Gursky, or Zvi Litvinoff!)

·       Chang-rae Lee, A Gesture Life. (Finely crafted account of an elderly immigrant’s attempt to come to terms with both his present circumstances and his haunting past in the Japanese army during World War II.)

·       David Lodge, Small World. (Although academe has now become its own satire, this book is one step ahead, and still one of the best in the genre.)

·       David Lodge, Thinks . . . (Tom Nagel, John Searle, zombies, and Mary the Color Scientist all mentioned in one novel! What audience did Lodge have in mind here?)

·       Lee Maynard, Crum. (Funny as hell coming-of-age story set in West Virginia. Often hard to find, but worth the effort.)

·       Joyce Carol Oates, I’ll Take You There.  (Neurotic undergraduate philosophy student looks for love in all the wrong places.)

·       Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried. (Searing images of military life during the Vietnam War. This fiction may be truer than history.)

·       Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2. (Can machines think? Find out here.)

·       Richard Powers, The Echo Maker.  (Capgras Syndrome raises deep questions about the nature of the self.  Another Powers triumph, and winner of the 2006 National Book Award for fiction.)

·       Richard Powers, The Gold Bug Variations. (Start with the allusive title, and go from there – a “cognitive science” novel and more by a MacArthur Fellow.)

·       Bruce Robinson, The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman. (Very odd and humorous, yet affecting coming-of-age story by author of Whitnail and I.)

·       Philip Roth, The Human Stain. (The downside of political correctness in academic life, and the final installment of Roth’s trilogy.)

·       Norman Rush, Mating. (Highly literate account of an academic’s trip across the Kalahari Desert, improbable yet believable.)

·       José Saramago, Blindness. (Nobel Prize-winner’s disturbing allegory of 20th century degradation.)

·       Tom Sharpe, Wilt. (Raunchier version of the David Lodge vision.)

·       Anne Tyler, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. (You won’t opt for any more family reunions after this one.)

·       Alice Walker, The Color Purple. (Survival and triumph of the human spirit, documented via a series of poignant letters.)

·       Tobias Wolff, Old School. (Travails of a prep school student, but with redemptive ending. For a an excellent prequel/autobiography with a similar theme, see Wolff’s This Boy’s Life.)

This Web site is maintained by Charles E. M. Dunlop, and was last revised on May 3, 2023. Send e-mail to me at cdunlop_AT_umich.edu