Ethics

The Uncanny Valley 8: Pet Robots

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, RMWMTMBM Archive, Uncanny Valley, Weak Humanism 1 Comment

[This is a continuation of my (now numerous) reflections on the Uncanny Valley. You can read the previous seven installments here if you’re interested.] Late last semester, as a part of my department’s semi-regular Philosophy Film Series, we screened Mechanical Love, a 2007 documentary about the ever-evolving relationships between humans and robots. The film focuses…

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Solicitation

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, RMWMTMBM Archive, Weak Humanism 3 Comments

Just today, I posted a solicitation for book recommendations as my Facebook status. I asked for fiction recs– proscribing Stieg Larsson in advance — and almost immediately received a host of literary endorsements from my many bibliophile friends (and, a pleasant surprise, from my students as well). I was happy to see that most of…

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Is Ground Zero A “Sacred” Site?

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive, Weak Humanism 6 Comments

As everyone knows, there has been much Sturm und Drang about the proposed Park 51 project (a.k.a., the “Ground Zero mosque”) and its proximity to the lower Manhattan site where the World Trade Center Towers stood before 9/11. Let me say at the outset that I’m not going to comment much here on the merits…

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Doing Harm

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Human Rights, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive, Torture, Weak Humanism 4 Comments

The Nobel Peace Prize-winning organization, Physicians for Human Rights, has just released a White Paper entitled “Experiments in Torture” that documents medical professionals’ complicity with CIA human intelligence collection programs, which include the now-infamous “enhanced interrogation techniques” (EITs), in post-9/11 detention centers. There is, of course, a continuing (and, at least on one side, entirely…

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Underdogmatism

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, RMWMTMBM Archive, Sports, Weak Humanism 8 Comments

I’m a total sucker for the underdog. I don’t even care what the domain is– sports, politics, games, academics, business, love, war– if there is an odds-on favorite, I’m pretty much guaranteed to root for his opponent. As many people have noted, 2010 is shaping up to be the Year of the Underdog, beginning with…

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Dark Side of Theory

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Human Rights, Philosophy, RMWMTMBM Archive, Weak Humanism 9 Comments

A few days ago, I posted an entry on this blog (“The Orchid Hypothesis“) about an article I had read in The Atlantic and found interesting. The Atlantic article was about a series of experiments and theoretical speculations that seemed to challenge some of our orthodox assumptions about the relationship between genetics and behavior, and…

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Cornel West’s Note to Obama: “How Deep Is Your Love For Poor And Working People?”

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Obama, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive, Weak Humanism 5 Comments

Just a couple of days ago, BBC News posted a video message from Princeton Professor Cornel West to President Barack Obama, on the occasion of Obama’s first anniversary in office. Unfortunately, the video itself cannot be embedded here, but if you click on West’s picture to the left, it will take you to the BBC…

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The Orchid Hypothesis

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, RMWMTMBM Archive, Weak Humanism 10 Comments

On my way back from the APA conference a week ago, I picked up a copy of The Atlantic in Laguardia to read on the plane ride home. In it, there was a fascinating article by David Dobbs called “The Science of Success,” which discusses the influence of certain genetic factors on social/psychological development. Dobbs…

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Friendly Fire

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, RMWMTMBM Archive, Weak Humanism 3 Comments

The 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…

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Right, Real, True… and Other Relative Terms

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson AnPan and RMWMTMBM, Philosophy, Relativism, RMWMTMBM Archive, Weak Humanism 2 Comments

Lest 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…

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