Politics

What You Can Do To Support PIKSI (which you *should* support) OTHER THAN Donating Your Money (which, if you are able, you *should* also do)

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Politics, Race and Racism, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching, Women and Gender Issues 0 Comments

It’s been a busy (in fact, record-breakingly busy) month here on RMWMTMBM, so I wanted to take a momentary break from the Leiter/PGR/SeptemberStatement brouhaha–about which this blog has more or less unfortunately become something akin to professional Philosophy’s version of TMZ— and instead remark upon an initiative as important to our discipline as, and not wholly…

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The Leiter/PGR Archive Is Now Closed (and, A Note from Your Archivist)

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Leiter, PGR, Philosophy, Politics, Race and Racism, RMWMTMBM Archive, SPEP, Women and Gender Issues 0 Comments

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,…

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CFT (Call For Tweeters) #SPEP14

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

Last 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…

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The Ferguson Lesson: Another Way To “Take Up Arms”

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson #BlackLivesMatter, Codifying Civility and Collegiality, Democracy, Ferguson, Philosophy, Politics, Race and Racism, RMWMTMBM Archive, Weak Humanism 0 Comments

As 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…

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Trolleys, Fat Men and Drones

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

Just 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…

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Missing: An Image of “The Worker” Today

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson 99%, Marx, Philosophy, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive 0 Comments

This 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…

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Ferguson Syllabus for Philosophers

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson #BlackLivesMatter, Codifying Civility and Collegiality, Ferguson, Open Source Pedagogy, Philosophy, Politics, Race and Racism, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching 0 Comments

Many 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…

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Democracy Must Always Be Severe

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Bon Mots, Codifying Civility and Collegiality, Democracy, Philosophy, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive 0 Comments

“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…

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American Apartheid

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson #BlackLivesMatter, Codifying Civility and Collegiality, Ferguson, Human Rights, Politics, Race and Racism, RMWMTMBM Archive 0 Comments

For 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…

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The CIA Report Is The Purloined Letter and Obama Is The Prefect: My Break-Up Letter to President Obama

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Human Rights, Obama, Philosophy, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive, Torture 0 Comments

In 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”…

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