Philosophy

The Uncanny Valley 6: Unreal and Unreal-er, or, Why a “Fake” Fake Isn’t Uncanny

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Music, Philosophy, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, RMWMTMBM Archive, Uncanny Valley 2 Comments

I made a brief mention in my last uncanny valley post about the difference between “real” music, by which I mean music played on actual (i.e. “real,” material or physical) musical instruments by musicians (i.e. human beings with some skill on those instruments, availing themselves of said instruments without superadded technological assistance) on the one…

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The Uncanny Valley 5: Double, Double, Toil and Trouble

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, RMWMTMBM Archive, Uncanny Valley 4 Comments

Over the course of the last year or so, I’ve written several posts about the “uncanny valley” on this blog. The theory of the uncanny valley is loosely based on Freud’s account of Das Unheimliche (the “uncanny”), a major trope of psychoanalytic theory and a favorite play-thing of literary, film and cultural theorists who borrow…

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200,000-Strong Bartlebys Unite To Say: “Meh”

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Obama, Philosophy, Politics, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, RMWMTMBM Archive 8 Comments

The much-ballyhooed “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear”— brainchild of America’s Ironists-in-Chief Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert— came and went this past Saturday in Washington, DC. Although the crowd-count estimates vary (as they always do), most put the number at somewhere between 200,000 and a quarter-million attendees. (TRANSLATION: For Midwesterners, that’s somewhere between the total…

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Deconstructing Sasha Fierce

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Music, Open Source Pedagogy, Philosophy, Politics, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching, Women and Gender Issues 10 Comments

I’m guessing that many of us have those fleeting fantasies from time to time in which we conjure up what we imagine would be the AWESOMEST. COURSE. EVER. For example, my fantasy courses: “I’m Not Here To Make Friends: Ethics and Reality TV” (sort of a cross between ethical theory, applied ethics, and existentialism), or…

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The Secret Little Book-Banner Inside You (and Me)

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching 11 Comments

This week is Banned Books Week, so designated by the American Library Association, which created the week in the hopes of motivating us to celebrate our “freedom to read.” The ALA keeps a list of the most frequently challenged books each year, including a list of banned “classics,” and my guess is that a quick…

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Details, Details…

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching 6 Comments

In the Humanities, we like to emphasize the importance of what we call “close reading,” by which we mean concentrated attention to the details of a text: syntax, specialized vocabulary, nuance and conditions, logical order, the manner in which ideas develop and are connected. We do this because we aim to achieve, I hope, precision…

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Cold War In The Classroom

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Open Source Pedagogy, Philosophy, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching 5 Comments

Dr. Miller, aka Anotherpanacea, has called me to account for my post a few days ago (“Why I Won’t Turn It In“), in which I detailed my objections to the pay-per-plagiarism-police service known as Turnitin.com. AnPan does use the service, and he offers his own justifications for that choice in his post titled “Why I…

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The Rich Man’s War Is The Poor Man’s Fight

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

Douglas Kriner and Francis Shen’s new book The Casualty Gap: The Causes and Consequences of America’s Wartime Inequalities (reviewed in The Nation here) proves that the age-old description of the American Civil War as a “rich man’s war and poor man’s fight”– which may or may not have been true of the Civil War– IS…

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Why I Won’t Turn It In

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Open Source Pedagogy, Philosophy, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching 4 Comments

I recently learned that my institution has signed up for Turnitin.com, an Internet “plagiarism-prevention” service that allows professors to submit students’ papers and checks them against other submissions to verify that they’ve not been copied. There’s no mandate at my institution yet (as far as I know) for faculty to participate, and so I plan…

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I Do Not Think That Word Means What You Think It Means

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Relativism, RMWMTMBM Archive, The Search for Values 5 Comments

I’m not ashamed to admit that philosophers can be quite persnickety in our insistence upon precision in language. Much of what we do, after all, involves precisely defining things, concepts, meanings, values, processes, systems, states of being and the like. That’s not to say that we are actually settled on precise definitions for everything; in…

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