This is the fifth installment of my series How It Will Go, documenting the regularity of students’ responses to certain figures/texts and, in the occasional rare instance that it happens, noting whatever variations I witness. Today’s episode: John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism Context in which I teach this figure text: Like Kant, I teach some variation of…
Read MoreThe disappearance of citizens displays a perversely cruel and absolute sovereignty. —Ruti Teitel, Transitional Justice (2002) I should begin by noting that I started writing what follows last week, after the publication of the New York Times story on the “1.5 Million Missing Black Men in America” but before the popular uprising in Baltimore that began Monday as…
Read MoreThe disappearance of citizens displays a perversely cruel and absolute sovereignty. —Ruti Teitel, Transitional Justice (2002) I should begin by noting that I started writing what follows last week, after the publication of the New York Times story on the “1.5 Million Missing Black Men in America” but before the popular uprising in Baltimore that began Monday as…
Read MoreFair warning: what follows will assume the arguments I’ve already made against the advisability of “civility/collegiality” codes in academia here and here. Read those first. Second fair warning: there’s a lot to read herein before you get to my advocacy of a “hostility code.” Be patient, grasshoppers. My general blogging habit inclines me toward what…
Read MoreI want to state for the record, right here at the start, that there is quite simply no other LIVING philosopher who has been more influential on my own work or thinking than Charles Mills. (I emphasize “living” as a perfunctory caveat, only because both Derrida and Rawls died during my lifetime as a professional Philosopher.) Over the last decade, I’ve…
Read MoreJust a random”Philosophy pedagogy” insight today: I’m teaching three sections of a course entitled “Contemporary Moral Problems” at Christian Brothers University this term, which is more or less CBU’s version of “Intro to Ethics.” As I’ve done in all of my past Ethics courses, I spend the second day of class leading students through a…
Read MoreThe earth revolves around the sun. Not everyone on talent shows has talent. The square root of four is two. Your mom did it with your dad. Also, it’s not easy being a woman in Philosophy. I won’t bother to link to the series of scandals that have beset the discipline of Philosophy over the…
Read MoreIt’s time for the next installment of my 2013 Year in Review Lists: the 2013 Year in Politics. Each December that I do this, it gets increasingly difficult to distinguish between the stories that properly belong on this list and those that fit more comfortably on the Year in Pop Culture list, which says something…
Read MoreHere’s one thing I will presume that we can all agree upon: every single one of us likes to have our views, positions, arguments and preferences confirmed by others. (If you don’t, then those aren’t your views, positions, arguments or preferences in any really defensible sense, are they?) Of course, because we live in a…
Read More
Recent Comments