Philosophy

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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Mulligan?

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive Comments Off on Mulligan?

One of my favorite stories ever was told to me by a colleague of mine in the Psychology Department, Dr. Julie Steel. Frustrated with end-of-the-semester appeals for better grades by wayward students, she figured there must be a better rejoinder than simply sighing in exasperation and staring-back with incredulity. So, when students ask that oh-so-familiar…

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Philosophy, Done Another Way

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching, Thinking in Images Comments Off on Philosophy, Done Another Way

As I mentioned a little while ago on this blog, I gave students in my Existentialism course this semester the option of making a short film for extra credit. The motivation for this was my frustration, in previous iterations of this course, with what I viewed as a deficiency on my part of adequately capturing…

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Friendly Fire

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, RMWMTMBM Archive, Weak Humanism 3 Comments

The disagreement between AnPan and I that has been taking place on our blogs (here and here) has reminded me of why I feel fortunate to have good friends like him. As it just so happens, this also is the time in the semester (at my instiution) when most of the first-years are deep into…

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Right, Real, True… and Other Relative Terms

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson AnPan and RMWMTMBM, Philosophy, Relativism, RMWMTMBM Archive, Weak Humanism 2 Comments

Lest I get too comfortable with my tiny, marginally-significant place in the blogosphere, thinking that we’re all friends here and readers of this blog are basically in agreement on the stuff that really matters, all of us interacting virtually in a kind of harmonious echo-chamber of progressive philosophical wonderment… yeah, lest I get too comfortable…

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Relative To What?

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

This will be brief, as I am now in the midst of grading, but I wanted to address AnPan’s response to my response on the whole issue of (his) moral realism versus (my) moral relativism before too much time passed. I think we may have the beginning of a rapprochement after reading AnPan’s last rebuttal,…

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A Parable for “Glorious” Essay-Writers Everywhere

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching 3 Comments

Whenever I’m grading papers at the end of the semester, there always comes a point when I am reminded of that peculiar conversation between Alice and Humpty Dumpty (from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass). After noting that there are 364 days of the year that one can receive un-birthday presents, Humpty Dumpty says to…

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Heidegger, We Hardly Knew Ya…

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, RMWMTMBM Archive 3 Comments

The brainy parts of the internet are all a-buzz recently about philosopher Martin Heidegger and his student Hannah Arendt, largely as a result of the publication of a series of provoctaive reviews of Emmanuel Faye’s provocatively titled book Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy. The most provocative of those reviews was an essay published…

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#Hashtags

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Ethics, Philosophy, Politics, Public Philosophy, Technology and Human Values Comments Off on #Hashtags
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