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…
Read MoreIt’s no secret that one of my guilty pleasures is reality television. I was an early convert to this genre of entertainment, having come of age around the same time that MTV’s groundbreaking series The Real World was in its prime. (The first season of that show was broadcast in my freshman year of college.)…
Read MoreThis 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,…
Read MoreThe 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…
Read MoreLest 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…
Read MoreAs 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…
Read MoreThe 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…
Read MoreI’ve been fascinated recently by the obvious change in tone of many television commercials. We’re in an economic downturn, in case you hadn’t heard, and so many of the major ad-men seem to have been forced to acquiesce to the hard fact of hard times. There’s a lot more emphasis on product “affordability,” a lot…
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 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…
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