Philosophy

Help Stop the Hastening of Death in Tennessee

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Memphis, Philosophy, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive, Weak Humanism 0 Comments

I was recently asked by a colleague, Dr. Lisa Guenther (Philosophy, Vanderbilt University), to add my signature to an open letter to Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam, petitioning him to suspend the scheduled execution of 10 inmates beginning in January.  I agreed to lend my name to the petition alongside several others in a coalition named…

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Grading War Letters to Home, Day 4

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson GradingWarLetterstoHome, Philosophy, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching 0 Comments

These are the letters from the fourth day of the Grading War.  If you landed here by accident and don’t know what you’re reading, click here for the backstory. 8 December 2013, 11:35pm My Dearest Leigh,  It is my sincere hope that these few words find you well. I have had no time to write,…

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Female Brains Are Prettier, More Fun At Parties, Less Tasty

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive, Women and Gender Issues 0 Comments

I almost titled this “Once More Into The Breach, Part Deux” in reference to my Once More Into The Breach, Dear Friends post from last week, which criticized the way in which conversations about gender disparity in professional Philosophy continue to be framed by concept-distorting and argument-disfiguring gender essentialism.  My targets today are not “philosophers”…

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Remember Who The Enemy Is

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

[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

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive, Women and Gender Issues 0 Comments

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

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Open Source Pedagogy, Philosophy, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching, Women and Gender Issues 0 Comments

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?

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

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!

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching 0 Comments

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

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

 “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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Doctor Nobody, or: How I Learned to Stop Sitting Passively By and Actually Fight the MOOC Machine

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Open Source Pedagogy, Philosophy, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching 68 Comments

As just-another college professor, it’s hard not to feel like the war against MOOCs is more than a little bit like the War on Drugs, or the War or Terror, or the War on Poverty.  The “enemy” is largely nonspecific, nonlocatable, plural, mutable, incredibly powerful and often invisible.  It’s hard to tell on which front…

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