This has been a strange month for academic Philosophy, for professional philosophers and, as a more or less direct consequence, for this blog. A little less than four weeks ago, on September 24, I began collecting various posts, essays and articles related to what I then anticipated was going to be, at the very least,…
Read MoreLast year’s meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) was the first such conference, as far as I’m aware, that was live-tweeted by a significant-enough number of participants to be noteworthy. I was one of the SPEP Twitterati last year in Eugene, and I wrote a post about that experience after I…
Read MoreAs someone who has spent the better part of her career researching, analyzing and teaching not only about the structure and nature of oppressive power regimes, but also better and worse ways to resist or transform such regimes, I’ve nevertheless been unable to settle in my own mind, to my own satisfaction, my position with…
Read MoreJust a random”Philosophy pedagogy” insight today: I’m teaching three sections of a course entitled “Contemporary Moral Problems” at Christian Brothers University this term, which is more or less CBU’s version of “Intro to Ethics.” As I’ve done in all of my past Ethics courses, I spend the second day of class leading students through a…
Read MoreThis semester I have the very good fortune of teaching a graduate course in the History of Theory and Criticism at Memphis College of Art. (Check out my syllabus here and the class blog here.) For their final projects, my students are required to employ one of the theories we studied during the semester to present a…
Read MoreMany of you have probably seen the excellent “Ferguson Syllabus” created by Sociologists for Justice, which has been circulated widely over the last several days and which provides a collection of research articles used to inform the arguments and positions represented in their Statement on Ferguson. I strongly encourage you to keep circulating that document, and…
Read More“Democracy must always be severe. Without either desire or dread of paradox, we may go even further. Democracy must always be unpopular. It is a religion, and the essence of a religion is that it constrains. Like every other religion, it asks men to do what they cannot do; to think steadily about the important…
Read MoreFor they know they are not animals. And at the very moment when they discover their humanity, they begin to sharpen their weapons to secure its victory. –Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth America has always been and remains an apartheid state. The latter part of that sad but increasingly undeniable fact was made apparent last night in…
Read MoreIn the immediate aftermath of 9/11, we did some things that were wrong. We did a whole lot of things that were right, but we tortured some folks. — President Barack Obama, Press Conference (Aug 1, 2014) “That is another of your odd notions,” said the Prefect, who had a fashion of calling everything “odd”…
Read MoreThere’s been a good bit conversation recently about the merits and demerits of “public philosophy” and, as someone who considers herself committed to public philosophy (whatever that is). I’m always happy to stumble across a piece of remarkably insightful philosophical work in the public realm. Case in point: Robin James (Philosophy, UNC-Charlotte) posted a really…
Read More
Recent Comments