Here’s the thing everyone needs to understand before s/he starts picking a fight: you can only back people into a corner so far before they come out swinging. UChicago law professor Brian Leiter has decided to pick a fight with me in a comment thread on his blog here. There, in a moderated thread allegedly addressing “issues…
Read MoreThe printing press, the telephone, the automobile, the airplane: each in their own way radically shrunk the world, diminished the power of mere distance to maintain our strangeness to one another. Yet, arguably, no human innovation has served as a greater tool for transcending Nature’s most seemingly impregnable boundaries, space and time, than the World…
Read MoreDespite much well-earned Sturm und Drang in the last few years surrounding the so-called crisis in the humanities, the regrettably pernicious corporatization of higher education, the imminent death of American universities, the (at turns, but more often in conjunction) sexist, racist, homophobic, classist and just garden-variety asshole-ish paucity of civility/collegiality in academia— especially in the discipline of Philosophy— I sometimes fear we…
Read MoreThis is the second installment in my How It Will Go series, 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: W.E.B. Du Bois on “The Conservation of Races” Context in which I teach this figure/text: I usually teach…
Read MoreI’m starting a new series on this blog today, which I’ve named How It Will Go (hereafter, HIWG). In each installment, I will anticipate how teaching a particular figure or text will go in my class, based on patterns that I’ve seen previously. If something unusual or noteworthy happens, I’ll report back on it, but I…
Read MoreThis is the third 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: Plato, “The Story of Gyges’ Ring,” (from The Republic) Context in which I teach this figure/text: I begin…
Read MoreThis is the fourth 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: Karl Marx on “Estranged Labor” from the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 Context in which I teach this…
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’ve never before posted about one of my rando (and, if you happen to be keeping score at home, only inconsistently successful) projects in advance of it actually being finished, *unless* I was relatively positive that said project would see itself to some non-embarrassing completion. (See: American Values Project and/or WORKING IN MEMPHIS: The Documentary for…
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…
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