Philosophy

25 Random Things About Me

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Dr. J's Lists, Memphis, Philosophy, Politics, Pop Culture/Film, Pop Culture/Film/Literature 10 Comments

So, there’s a thing going around on Facebook that asks people to list 25 random things about themselves. I usually delete messages like this immediately, but for whatever reason I actually filled out the list this time. I suppose that the point of this exercise is to show something revelatory about what the author finds…

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Clean Slate

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

It’s funny how a simple and arbitrary change in the calander date can give us all the impression that something has really started over, that we have begun a new project that is in some way really distinct from the one we were in only a couple of days ago, that the weight of 2008’s…

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Antiheroes (Again)

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

There’s an article in the current issue of Newsweek by Joshua Alston entitled “Too Much of a Bad Thing” (without a question mark, but I’ll come back to that later) that claims we are all suffering from “Antihero Overload” and bemoans the fact that “no one on TV can be merely good or evil anymore.”…

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Picture This…

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy 3 Comments

I recently discovered wordle.net, which generates “word clouds” from text that you enter. The program gives greater prominence to words that appear more frequently, thus producing a kind of shorthand-image of what is emphasized in the original text. I know that readers of this blog probably don’t need yet another Internet distraction, but this one…

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Foodies

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

Over on KHG’s blog, there’s a really interesting post (Titillating Food) about her experiment with trying to make “caramel sea salt.” Reading it, and amazing at all of the care and thought that went into such a project, got me thinking about that odd-variety of human being that we call the foodie. The foodie differs…

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More Medical Mysteries

June 9, 2024 Dr. J Human Rights, Philosophy, Politics, Weak Humanism Comments Off on More Medical Mysteries

I’ve mentioned my fascination with medical mysteries before on this blog (see: my post on Apotemnophilia). I suppose that part of that fascination is simply grounded in the strangeness of some of the conditions, but I am also particularly interested in the way that medical knowledge is stymied. A couple of years ago, I read…

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Horowitz at the MLA

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Politics 3 Comments

Anyone remember the “culture wars”? Now that we’ve got all this change we can believe in, people don’t talk about them very much anymore, but the battle is far from over. One of the leading soldiers on the conservative side for years has been David Horowitz, who has a blog here and a “Freedom Center”…

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Sovereign Exception

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Politics 1 Comment

As President George W. Bush’s time draws to a close, he will be spending some of his time (while he’s not dodging size 10’s, that is) deciding how to exercise his right to extend pardons and commutations. Just this past Friday, Bush awarded federal forgiveness to 17 “minor” criminals, 16 of which were pardons and…

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Blogging in the Classroom, Revisited

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Open Source Pedagogy, Philosophy, Teaching, The Search for Values 5 Comments

As promised in my earlier post on this topic (which you can read at Blogging in the Classroom, originally posted in September), I’m back to report on my pedagogical experiment with blogging this semester. You can go back and read the earlier post if you want to know my justifications for trying this, so I…

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When It’s Not Funny Anymore

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Politics 9 Comments

A mere 37 days before leaving office, our Lame-Duck-in-Chief President Bush was all the news yesterday. During a press conference in Baghdad with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki, a Shiite Iraqi journalist (Muntadar al-Zeidi) stood up and threw one of his shoes– and then the other– at President Bush’s head, missing Bush by a hair…

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