I just returned home from four days in the hospital, having been taken there by ambulance last Friday morning. I should say at the outset that I’m not exactly a stranger to hospitals. I’m a Type 1 Diabetic and about 10 years ago I was also diagnosed with a mysterious condition that my doctors called…
Read MoreI usually try to avoid recommending books until I’ve finished reading them, but I am so thoroughly enjoying Sarah Vowell’s The Wordy Shipmates that I’m going to go ahead and jump the gun on this one. Sarah Vowell (regular contributor to PRI’s This American Life and author of Assasination Vacation) is the very best kind…
Read MoreAs readers of this blog know, I implemented a new pedagogical technique in all of my courses a while back that I called “blogging in the classroom” and that I described here and here. (If you scroll down on the column to your right, you can find links to the student blogs for courses I…
Read MoreAs I recounted in my first post on the uncanny valley, I learned of this phenomenon from a student in one of my classes. I can’t remember the exact context of his bringing it up– it had something to do with our knowledge of the outside world as contested, and then proven, by Descartes in…
Read MoreI think if you asked my students to name one single value that I hold, passionately, they would say: “She HATES lazy relativism.” I deliver my diatribe against lazy relativism in every class– usually multiple times– to the point where I actually feel sorry for students who have taken my classes more than once and…
Read MoreAfter posting my bit on lazy relativism yesterday, my good friend and colleague, economist Prof. Art Carden (who also blogs regularly over at Division of Labour), sent me the following email: I really, really enjoyed your post on “lazy relativism” and have a suggestion for a followup that would help non-experts like myself: what’s “non-lazy…
Read MoreI was talking to one of my colleagues recently about our shared concern for demonstrating to students that “philosophy” and “religion” (or theology, or religious studies, or whatever) are different disciplines. Although they sometimes address the same subject matter, and although there is much in religion that is philosophical and much in philosophy that is…
Read MoreI’m working on the chapter of my manuscript that traces the genealogy of human rights discourse through the Enlightenment, and I had the opportunity today to re-read Descartes’ Letter of Dedication that prefaces his Meditations on First Philosophy. What a hoot! (Admittedly, I may be getting a little punchy and it might not be that…
Read MoreCarlin Romano (Univ. of Pennsylvania) recently wrote an excellent piece for The Chronicle of Higher Education heralding President Obama as our first “Philosopher-in-Chief,” an honorific given to him largely as a result of the nuanced cosmopolitanism that characterized his Cairo speech entitled “A New Beginning” (full text and video of that address here). I was…
Read MoreLast year, in my section of our College’s great books program (which is called “The Search for Values”), I taught Michel Foucault’s Fearless Speech for the first time. The book is an edited volume comprised of six lectures that Foucault delivered at the University of California-Berkeley in the fall of 1983, all centered around the…
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