This is the third installment of my series How It Will Go, documenting the regularity of students’ responses to certain figures/texts and, in the occasional rare instance that it happens, noting whatever variations I witness. Today’s episode: Plato, “The Story of Gyges’ Ring,” (from The Republic) Context in which I teach this figure/text: I begin…
Read MoreThis is the second installment in my How It Will Go series, documenting the regularity of students’ responses to certain figures/texts and, in the occasional rare instance that it happens, noting whatever variations I witness. Today’s episode: W.E.B. Du Bois on “The Conservation of Races” Context in which I teach this figure/text: I usually teach…
Read MoreI’m starting a new series on this blog today, which I’ve named How It Will Go (hereafter, HIWG). In each installment, I will anticipate how teaching a particular figure or text will go in my class, based on patterns that I’ve seen previously. If something unusual or noteworthy happens, I’ll report back on it, but I…
Read MoreThe printing press, the telephone, the automobile, the airplane: each in their own way radically shrunk the world, diminished the power of mere distance to maintain our strangeness to one another. Yet, arguably, no human innovation has served as a greater tool for transcending Nature’s most seemingly impregnable boundaries, space and time, than the World…
Read MoreDespite much well-earned Sturm und Drang in the last few years surrounding the so-called crisis in the humanities, the regrettably pernicious corporatization of higher education, the imminent death of American universities, the (at turns, but more often in conjunction) sexist, racist, homophobic, classist and just garden-variety asshole-ish paucity of civility/collegiality in academia— especially in the discipline of Philosophy— I sometimes fear we…
Read MoreJust a few months ago, in September, I somewhat unceremoniously celebrated my 8th year at the helm of this still-imperfect, though incrementally improving, work-in-progress blog. My first couple of years were an experiment, to be sure, but I found my stride here at RMWMTMBM around 2008 or so, and it’s been mostly gravy since. I’m…
Read MoreEach December since 2010, I’ve dedicated a few posts to subject-specific “Year in Review” lists. (You can view my previous years’ lists here.) In the past, these lists have customarily appraised the highs and lows of politics, music, film, literature or pop culture for whatever year was drawing to its end. That is to say,…
Read MoreI’ve never before posted about one of my rando (and, if you happen to be keeping score at home, only inconsistently successful) projects in advance of it actually being finished, *unless* I was relatively positive that said project would see itself to some non-embarrassing completion. (See: American Values Project and/or WORKING IN MEMPHIS: The Documentary for…
Read MoreA pen (or keyboard) has, for millennia, been both the preferred and most essential tool of a philosopher, but I consider my camera to be a very close second as a 21stC philosopher. Since completing the American Values Project in 2012, I’ve come to understand my camera as another weapon in the struggle against ignorance and,…
Read MoreWe continue awaiting the decision of a grand jury on whether or not to indict Darren Wilson, a white police officer, who shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, exactly 15 weeks ago today on a suburban street in Ferguson, Missouri. News reporters from across the globe have been camped out in Ferguson for…
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