Last night at the 51st Grammy Awards, the Recording Academy President Neil Portnow extended a long-overdue appeal to President Obama when he said: “Our finest national treasure is our culture in the arts, so it’s time that we acknowledged that fact with the creation of the Cabinet position of Secretary of the Arts.” How right…
Read MorePerhaps one of the most ethically challenging, and truly heartwrenching, figures of contemporary (by which I mean, post-WWII) philosophy is that of the Muselmann. The word Muselmann literally means “Muslim” (“one who submits to God”), but is used to refer to prisoners of Nazi concentration camps who had become so destitute and dehumanized as to…
Read MoreAbout a month ago, I started watching the television show “24” from its beginning. I was immediately hooked, as I wrote in my initial post on the subject (“24” Is Like Television Crack), and this week I just began Season 5. My general impression is that the quality of the show declined after the first…
Read MoreDespite the questionable and declining quality of my internal parts, I am registered as an organ donor. Every few years, when I go to renew my drivers license, this decision seems like a no-brainer. Now, I’ll admit that it may be the case that my organ-altruism is really motivated by self-interest, since I am a…
Read More… then it must be a duck. Beginning today, my Philosophy of Race class will be learning about the first theorists of eugenics, an early 20th C. pseudo-science that (in the words of one of its founders and leading proponents, Sir Francis Galton) studied “all agencies under human control which can improve or impair the…
Read MoreFor those of you who missed Super Bowl XLIII last night between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Arizona Cardinals, it was one for the books. Pittsburgh came out on top with an impressive last-2-minutes drive into the red zone, culminating in a double-take where wide receiver Santonio Holmes first missed–then caught– a touchdown pass from…
Read MoreJudith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California-Berkeley, delivered a lecture Thursday night at The University of Memphis entitled “Vulnerability, Survivability: The Political Affects of War.” For the most part, Butler’s lecture drew upon her recent work in Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence and Who…
Read MoreOver at anotherpanacea, there’s a really fascinating and mature consideration of what AnPan calls “Critique in the Age of Hope.” The basic concern underlying AnPan’s essay, as I read it, is that the general ethos of good-will and hope that has accompanied President Obama into the White House might find its expression in an unwitting…
Read MoreThose pensive-looking guys to the left are 20th C. philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Bertrand Russell. Although they come from different ends of the philosophical spectrum– existentialism and literature for Sartre, mathematical logic and analytic philosophy for Russell–they did share a passion for and commitment to the life of that long-lost animal, the engaged intellectual. It…
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