Year: 2013

Grading War Letters to Home, Winter 2013 (The Unabridged Collection)

Preliminary note: If you’re here because you’re checking back for updates on the Grading War archive, rest assured that new letters are still being added as they appear.  However, this was getting a bit on the long side for a single post, so I’m breaking up the letters by day now.  Click the following links…

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Grading War Letters to Home, Day 2

These are the letters from the second day of the Grading War.  If you landed here by accident and don’t know what you’re reading, click here for the backstory. 6 December 2013, 10:05amDearest Marcus, I take up my pen this morning to inform you once more of my disconsolate station. Please pardon the poor condition…

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Grading War Letters to Home, Day 1

These are the letters from the first day of the Grading War.  If you landed here by accident and don’t know what you’re reading, click here for the backstory. 5 December 2013, 3:29pm Dearest Marcus, The battle here rages on unabated, only intensifying my longing for Deliverance, for the warmth and Safety of your hearth…

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Remember Who The Enemy Is

[Disclaimer: I haven’t read any of the books in Suzanne Collins’ wildly popular Hunger Games trilogy, though I did see the first movie version of that trilogy (The Hunger Games) last year and I just saw the second film, currently out in theaters, Catching Fire.  I’ll go ahead and stipulate that the books are probably…

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Once More Into The Breach, Dear Friends

Prompted by a recent piece on newAPPS, I’m (somewhat reluctantly) forced to acknowledge the renewed attention to a not-at-all-new phenomenon in the world of Philosophy over the last couple of years, namely, the dramatic under-representation of women in our profession.  Here’s what you need to know up front, assuming that some of you readers are…

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Tolerance Is Not A Virtue

Let me be clear at the outset: when I say that tolerance is not a virtue, I’m saying that as a philosopher for whom virtue has a conceptually substantive meaning.  I do not mean to imply that tolerance is a vice, a claim to which I think no reasonable moral agent, and no philosopher worth…

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Genius: Generative or Generic?

I had the very good fortune of seeing historian Darrin McMahon (Florida State University), author of the recently published Divine Fury: A History of Genius, deliver a lecture last week as part of Rhodes College’s year-long Communities in Conversation lecture series. I want to write a bit here about some of the questions his book…

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AltAc, TransAc, PostAc and Just Plain Old ACK!

Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow published a piece a few days ago in the NYT entitled “The Repurposed Ph.D.,” which served as my first introduction to the neologism “post-academic.” The abbreviated (and eminently hashtaggable) version of that term– “PostAc”– is something like the poorer, sadder and less pretty twin of “AltAc” (“alternative academic”), which has for the last…

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Tweeting #SPEP13

 “SPEP is not a mini-APA.” –Anthony Steinbock, 25 October 2013 That quote is from a plenary address delivered this past weekend by Tony Steinbock, Executive Co-Director of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, entitled “SPEP and the Continental Divide.”  SPEP is the second-largest organization for professional philosophers– the largest is the American Philosophical Association…

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Hate Crimes, Complicated: Or, Why It’s So Hard To Do What’s Right, Even When You’re “Right”

I’ve never been in a fist-fight in my entire life  but, yesterday, I received my first black eye. I got my black eye roughly 48 hours ago now, on what just so happened to be the last day of my College’s Fall break, which ended Tuesday evening.  I spent the entire evening on Tuesday with…

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