Philosophy

Dirt-Cheap Ideas

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive 12 Comments

In his seminal text Fear and Trembling, Soren Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous narrator, Johannes de Silentio, remarks: Not just in commerce but in the world of ideas too our age is putting on a veritable clearance sale. Everything can be had so dirt cheap that one begins to wonder whether in the end anyone will want to…

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Omaha (Somewhere in Middle America)

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, RMWMTMBM Archive 1 Comment

I’ll be giving the keynote address at the 12th Annual Midwest Undergraduate Philosophy Conference next weekend, hosted by Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. (That’s the Creighton campus in the image to the left… or so says Google Image Search, anyway.) You can see the full conference schedule here. The title of my keynote is “Human…

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Trials for Terrorists

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Human Rights, Philosophy, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive 7 Comments

Earlier this month, Senator Lindsay Graham (R-South Carolina) introduced a bill that would prohibit the use of Justice Department funds for prosecuting alleged 9/11 plotters in federal courts. The aim of the bill (and a similar one introduced in the House by Representative Frank Wolf from Virginia) is to tie the Obama administration’s hands and…

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The Things They Take With Them From Class

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Open Source Pedagogy, Philosophy, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching 1 Comment

I’m inclined to just post this image without any explanation at all. It’s a snapshot of a status update I saw on Facebook yesterday in reference to my colleague Dr. Grady and myself. Grady is teaching Kant’s first Critique right now, and I just began teaching Marx in my 19th C. Philosophy course. (You can…

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More On Tenure

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

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a follow-up piece on the Amy Bishop story called “Reactions: Is Tenure a Matter of Life and Death?”, in which they ask several academics (at varying levels of seniority) to repond to the questions: What are the psychological effects of academic culture, particularly on rising scholars? Can or should…

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Dark Side of Theory

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Human Rights, Philosophy, RMWMTMBM Archive, Weak Humanism 9 Comments

A few days ago, I posted an entry on this blog (“The Orchid Hypothesis“) about an article I had read in The Atlantic and found interesting. The Atlantic article was about a series of experiments and theoretical speculations that seemed to challenge some of our orthodox assumptions about the relationship between genetics and behavior, and…

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Unscrambling Marx

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching 10 Comments

I’m about to begin teaching Karl Marx in my 19th C. philosophy class this week. Although students usually get some (very elementary) introduction to Marx in most of my other classes as well, this is the course in which they get the most extensive and systematic exposure to his writings. I always anticipate the Marx…

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The Orchid Hypothesis

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, RMWMTMBM Archive, Weak Humanism 10 Comments

On my way back from the APA conference a week ago, I picked up a copy of The Atlantic in Laguardia to read on the plane ride home. In it, there was a fascinating article by David Dobbs called “The Science of Success,” which discusses the influence of certain genetic factors on social/psychological development. Dobbs…

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Battle of the Sexists?

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

First, my apologies to regular readers of this blog for my extended absence of late. As some of you know, my department is hiring for a new tenure-track line this semester, a process which has the tendency to eat up every last moment of “spare” time for everyone involved. Second, I hope that you don’t…

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The Peter Principle

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

I just read an article in NewScientist about the “Peter Principle” (based on the theory put forth by Laurence Peter and Raymond Hull in their 1998 book The Peter Principle: Why things always go wrong). The Peter Principle is a fundamental law of “Hierarchiology” that states: In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to…

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