[Update: This post is the first in an ongoing series about the Uncanny Valley. Click here to read them all.] A couple of weeks ago when I was teaching Descartes’ Meditations, one of my students made reference to something called the “uncanny valley,” which I had never heard of before but which sounded really fascinating….
Read More[This is a continutation of my previous post on the uncanny valley. If you don’t know what the uncanny valley is, you may want to go back and read the previous post first.] In 1931, at the beginning of the dénouement of the Harlem Renaissance, conservative (some would say “reactionary”) African-American author George Schuyler penned…
Read MoreI usually try to avoid recommending books until I’ve finished reading them, but I am so thoroughly enjoying Sarah Vowell’s The Wordy Shipmates that I’m going to go ahead and jump the gun on this one. Sarah Vowell (regular contributor to PRI’s This American Life and author of Assasination Vacation) is the very best kind…
Read MoreAs readers of this blog know, I implemented a new pedagogical technique in all of my courses a while back that I called “blogging in the classroom” and that I described here and here. (If you scroll down on the column to your right, you can find links to the student blogs for courses I…
Read MoreAs I recounted in my first post on the uncanny valley, I learned of this phenomenon from a student in one of my classes. I can’t remember the exact context of his bringing it up– it had something to do with our knowledge of the outside world as contested, and then proven, by Descartes in…
Read MoreI think if you asked my students to name one single value that I hold, passionately, they would say: “She HATES lazy relativism.” I deliver my diatribe against lazy relativism in every class– usually multiple times– to the point where I actually feel sorry for students who have taken my classes more than once and…
Read MoreAfter posting my bit on lazy relativism yesterday, my good friend and colleague, economist Prof. Art Carden (who also blogs regularly over at Division of Labour), sent me the following email: I really, really enjoyed your post on “lazy relativism” and have a suggestion for a followup that would help non-experts like myself: what’s “non-lazy…
Read MoreAt the beginning of the 2008 film Doubt (an adaptation of John Patrick Shanley’s play by the same name), a priest challenges his congregation with an unorthodox sermon about the nature of the ties that bind us together. Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) asks his flock: “What do you do when you’re not sure? ”…
Read MoreI was talking to one of my colleagues recently about our shared concern for demonstrating to students that “philosophy” and “religion” (or theology, or religious studies, or whatever) are different disciplines. Although they sometimes address the same subject matter, and although there is much in religion that is philosophical and much in philosophy that is…
Read MoreI’m working on the chapter of my manuscript that traces the genealogy of human rights discourse through the Enlightenment, and I had the opportunity today to re-read Descartes’ Letter of Dedication that prefaces his Meditations on First Philosophy. What a hoot! (Admittedly, I may be getting a little punchy and it might not be that…
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