Aesthetics

Determining a Judgment of Taste

July 16, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Aesthetics, Blog2024+, critical thinking, Ethics, Open Source Pedagogy, Philosophy, Politics, Race and Racism, Relativism, Uncategorized 0 Comments

On Kant’s strange anecdote of the rue de la Huchette

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BLACK MIRROR REFLECTIONS Ep3: “The National Anthem” with Ammon Allred

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Black Mirror, Black Mirror Reflections, Blog, Blog 2023+, Ethics, Philosophy, Politics, Public Philosophy, RMWMTMBM Archive, Technology, Technology and Human Values, Television 0 Comments

In Episode 3 of BLACK MIRROR REFLECTIONS, I am joined by one of my absolute favorite human beings, Dr. Ammon Allred, who is also quite literally the only person with whom I feel comfortable recording a conversation about Black Mirror‘s inaugural episode, “The National Anthem.” And, after having recorded said episode, I’m already having second thoughts about…

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Motivation

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Aesthetics, Music, Philosophy, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, Public Philosophy, RMWMTMBM Archive 0 Comments

It’s Saturday, the hardest day of the week to find motivation to get things done.  Luckily for me, I have almost unrestricted access to all the music ever written (thanks, Google Play!), a stereo with a volume dial that goes all the way up to 10 (thanks, technology!), and neighbors who don’t mind my loudness because…

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Horror

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Aesthetics, Film, Philosophy, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, Public Philosophy, RMWMTMBM Archive 0 Comments

I do not enjoy horror films. Not even a little bit. They genuinely terrify me. I hate them, I won’t voluntarily go to them, and no amount of cajoling or ridicule will change my mind about that. Now, I should note here at the start that I don’t believe that ghosts or spirits or devils…

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Purposiveness

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Aesthetics, Philosophy, Public Philosophy, RMWMTMBM Archive 0 Comments

I thought I might slip in a somewhat “technical” philosophy post, since I’m blogging every day this month and those of you not interested in such things can just hold on until tomorrow. Today, I’m going to say a bit about Kant, and a tiny little thing that has been nagging about his Critique of…

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On Teaching Our Incapacity To Unexperience

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Aesthetics, Ethics, Film, Open Source Pedagogy, Philosophy, Public Philosophy, RMWMTMBM Archive, SPEP, Teaching, Thinking in Images, Trigger Warnings, Weak Humanism 0 Comments

They say you can’t “unring a bell.” It’s an analogy that is often used to illustrate our incapacity to un-experience things, to erase lived-experiences from our bodies and minds. What I discovered recently is how particularly true that is in the classroom. A few weeks ago in my Philosophy and Film course, we screened Werner…

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Relativism, Revolutionary Fictionalism, Moral Facts and #TheDress

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

[Disclaimer: this post is a brief, quickly-composed and so incomplete response to a number of tangentially-related events and essays from the last several days.  I have a lot more to say about all of them, including how they are not merely tangentially-related, but not now.] If you haven’t already, you should read yesterday’s Stone article in the…

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Philosophy’s Next Generation of Auteurs

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Digital Humanities, Film, Open Source Pedagogy, Philosophy, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching, Thinking in Images 0 Comments

Once again this semester, I assigned short-film projects to the students in my Existentialism course.  And once again, the products of that assignment (which I only just finished grading) were amazing.  I’ve employed this assignment in select courses for the last several years and each year the students’ films have gotten more and more impressive. …

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Concepts in Motion (or, Why You Should Assign Short-Films in Philosophy Courses)

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Film, Open Source Pedagogy, Philosophy, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching, Thinking in Images 0 Comments

“I say that I do philosophy, which is to say that I try to invent concepts.  What if I say, to you who do cinema: what do you do?” –Gilles Deleuze French philosopher Gilles Deleuze famously speculated in Cinema 1 (1983) that what he called the “movement-image,” a unique creative product of cinema, makes it…

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Thinking In Images

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Open Source Pedagogy, Philosophy, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching, Thinking in Images 3 Comments

I was at a dinner party recently with colleagues and, per usual, the conversation at some point turned to bemoaning students’ sometimes less-than-ideal language skills. The complaints were standard fare– what ever happened to proper grammar? to sophisticated and orderly essay construction? to close and careful reading skills? to the capacity for clearly translating ideas…

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