Aesthetics

Humanity vs. Technology (in 5 minutes)

July 31, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Aesthetics, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Biotech, Blog2024+, critical thinking, Democracy, Digital Humanities, Emergent Tech, Ethics, Internet, Justice, Labor Issues, Machine Learning, Open Source Pedagogy, Philosophy, Politics, Posthuman, Public Philosophy, Social Media, Surveillance, Teaching, Technology, Technology and Human Values, Uncanny Valley 0 Comments

Dr. Leigh M. Johnson summarizes the challenges technology poses to humanity (and the humanities) in 5-minute PowerPoint.

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Determining a Judgment of Taste

July 16, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Aesthetics, Blog2024+, critical thinking, Ethics, Open Source Pedagogy, Philosophy, Politics, Race and Racism, Relativism, Uncategorized 0 Comments

On Kant’s strange anecdote of the rue de la Huchette

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Motivation

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Aesthetics, Music, Philosophy, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, Public Philosophy, RMWMTMBM Archive 0 Comments

It’s Saturday, the hardest day of the week to find motivation to get things done.  Luckily for me, I have almost unrestricted access to all the music ever written (thanks, Google Play!), a stereo with a volume dial that goes all the way up to 10 (thanks, technology!), and neighbors who don’t mind my loudness because…

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Horror

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Aesthetics, Film, Philosophy, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, Public Philosophy, RMWMTMBM Archive 0 Comments

I do not enjoy horror films. Not even a little bit. They genuinely terrify me. I hate them, I won’t voluntarily go to them, and no amount of cajoling or ridicule will change my mind about that. Now, I should note here at the start that I don’t believe that ghosts or spirits or devils…

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Purposiveness

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Aesthetics, Philosophy, Public Philosophy, RMWMTMBM Archive 0 Comments

I thought I might slip in a somewhat “technical” philosophy post, since I’m blogging every day this month and those of you not interested in such things can just hold on until tomorrow. Today, I’m going to say a bit about Kant, and a tiny little thing that has been nagging about his Critique of…

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On Teaching Our Incapacity To Unexperience

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Aesthetics, Ethics, Film, Open Source Pedagogy, Philosophy, Public Philosophy, RMWMTMBM Archive, SPEP, Teaching, Thinking in Images, Trigger Warnings, Weak Humanism 0 Comments

They say you can’t “unring a bell.” It’s an analogy that is often used to illustrate our incapacity to un-experience things, to erase lived-experiences from our bodies and minds. What I discovered recently is how particularly true that is in the classroom. A few weeks ago in my Philosophy and Film course, we screened Werner…

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Relativism, Revolutionary Fictionalism, Moral Facts and #TheDress

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Aesthetics, Ethics, Open Source Pedagogy, Philosophy, Politics, Relativism, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching, Technology 0 Comments

[Disclaimer: this post is a brief, quickly-composed and so incomplete response to a number of tangentially-related events and essays from the last several days.  I have a lot more to say about all of them, including how they are not merely tangentially-related, but not now.] If you haven’t already, you should read yesterday’s Stone article in the…

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