Philosophy

Ass[backwards]essment in Higher Ed

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching 6 Comments

About a week ago, in a NYT article entitled “Deep in the Heart of Texas,” professor and provocateur Stanley Fish lambasted the Texas Public Policy Foundation and Texas Governor Rick Perry for proposing that the evaluation of faculty should move to a more “consumerist” (Fish calls it “mercenary”) model. The proposal would require college and…

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Thanks x 50K

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

We’ve reached another milestone here at Dr J’s blog: 50,000 hits! We passed 10,000 hits back in our second year, and so it’s exciting to reach the 50K mark at just under four years! Here’s a big THANK YOU to all the readers who keep coming back to this small little speck in the blogosphere….

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In Praise of Smartypants

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

This morning, in stereotypical egghead fashion, I tuned my radio to the Saturday NPR programming, poured myself a cup of coffee, and sat down to read the most recent (June 7) issue of the New Yorker. In the mini-essay section “Talk of the Town,” located near the beginning of every New Yorker, there was a…

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Dr. J Answers Your Questions

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Dr. J's Lists, Just Ask, Memphis, Philosophy, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive 1 Comment

A while ago, I invited readers to submit questions through my “Ask Doctor J” site over on Formspring and promised I would do my best to answer them here on the blog. Then, I quickly forgot about the whole thing. Oops. I just went back and found that there was quite a list of questions…

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Yes, Jessica, You CAN Do Anything Good

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Politics, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, RMWMTMBM Archive, Women and Gender Issues 2 Comments

I’m not usually one to forward or re-post YouTube videos of cute kids doing cute things, of which there are literally hundreds of thousands, but I recently came across one that I just couldn’t resist. It’s a little girl named Jessica– I’m guessing around 4 or 5 years old, probably pre-school age– standing on her…

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Lazy Relativism, Again

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

As readers of this blog (and students in my classes) know well, I hate lazy relativism. I readily concede that there are lots of things about which we cannot know the Absolute Truth (s’il y en a), but regardless of the strengh or weakness of any particular truth-claim, it will ALWAYS be the case that…

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Underdogmatism

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, RMWMTMBM Archive, Sports, Weak Humanism 8 Comments

I’m a total sucker for the underdog. I don’t even care what the domain is– sports, politics, games, academics, business, love, war– if there is an odds-on favorite, I’m pretty much guaranteed to root for his opponent. As many people have noted, 2010 is shaping up to be the Year of the Underdog, beginning with…

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Here’s My “Top 25 Books” List, Now Build Me A Park

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Dr. J's Lists, Philosophy, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, RMWMTMBM Archive 6 Comments

Inspired by Brooke Foy’s project for UrbanArt at Brent Ferguson Park, where she is building a maze of huge, concrete books as a public art installation, I tried to figure out which books I would choose for such a project. Here, I’ve listed my Top 25 Books. I don’t think Brooke Foy reads this blog,…

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What Makes It “Art”?

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Film, Film Reviews, Philosophy, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, RMWMTMBM Archive 7 Comments

In the documentary film Man on Wire, about French high-wire walker Philippe Petit (pictured left traversing the space between the World Trade Towers in 1974), Petit remarks several times that his act was more than simply a daredevil stunt, but rather it was a work of art. This evaluation is echoed by his co-conspirators in…

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The Political

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive 2 Comments

When I was in graduate school, I had a professor who regularly bemoaned the habit, common among philosophers, of referring to (questions, theories, problems and issues of) “the political” or “the ethical.” His objection, as I understood it, was not to engaging political and ethical questions qua philosophical questions, but rather to the use of…

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