Philosophy

Tolerance Is Not A Virtue

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

Let me be clear at the outset: when I say that tolerance is not a virtue, I’m saying that as a philosopher for whom virtue has a conceptually substantive meaning.  I do not mean to imply that tolerance is a vice, a claim to which I think no reasonable moral agent, and no philosopher worth…

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Genius: Generative or Generic?

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

I had the very good fortune of seeing historian Darrin McMahon (Florida State University), author of the recently published Divine Fury: A History of Genius, deliver a lecture last week as part of Rhodes College’s year-long Communities in Conversation lecture series. I want to write a bit here about some of the questions his book…

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AltAc, TransAc, PostAc and Just Plain Old ACK!

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

Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow published a piece a few days ago in the NYT entitled “The Repurposed Ph.D.,” which served as my first introduction to the neologism “post-academic.” The abbreviated (and eminently hashtaggable) version of that term– “PostAc”– is something like the poorer, sadder and less pretty twin of “AltAc” (“alternative academic”), which has for the last…

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Tweeting #SPEP13

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

 “SPEP is not a mini-APA.” –Anthony Steinbock, 25 October 2013 That quote is from a plenary address delivered this past weekend by Tony Steinbock, Executive Co-Director of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, entitled “SPEP and the Continental Divide.”  SPEP is the second-largest organization for professional philosophers– the largest is the American Philosophical Association…

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Doctor Nobody, or: How I Learned to Stop Sitting Passively By and Actually Fight the MOOC Machine

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Open Source Pedagogy, Philosophy, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching 20 Comments

As just-another college professor, it’s hard not to feel like the war against MOOCs is more than a little bit like the War on Drugs, or the War or Terror, or the War on Poverty.  The “enemy” is largely nonspecific, nonlocatable, plural, mutable, incredibly powerful and often invisible.  It’s hard to tell on which front…

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Poverty Porn, Pre-Humanism and Beasts of the Southern Wild

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Film, Film Reviews, Philosophy, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, RMWMTMBM Archive, Weak Humanism 0 Comments

Several weeks ago, I saw Beasts of the Southern Wild (adapted from the one-act play Juicy and Delicious by Lucy Alibar), the first feature-length film by director Benh Zeitlin and possibly one of the toughest films to characterize that I’ve ever seen.  Whatever other faults it may have– and I will get to those shortly–…

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The “Real” and “True” You

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Digital Humanities, Film, Philosophy, Politics, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, Relativism, RMWMTMBM Archive, Technology, Weak Humanism 0 Comments

Last week, my Philosophy and Film class took up the theme of “documentary truth.”  In preparation for our Tuesday night seminar, students were required to choose one film from a list of documentaries (Grizzly Man, The Thin Blue Line, Night and Fog, Bowling for Columbine, Capturing the Friedmans, Man on Wire, Super Size Me, Ghosts…

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Film of Exception: Zero Dark Thirty

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

I’m not sure exactly where to place the blame for the total disappointment that is the (Academy Award-nominated) film Zero Dark Thirty, which tells a based-on-real-events story of “the greatest manhunt in history.”  The hunted is, of course, al-Qaeda founder and mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks Osama bin Laden.  Zero Dark Thirty is organized as…

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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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Facebook Privacy Dis-Agreement

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Digital Humanities, Philosophy, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching 0 Comments

It’s been a little while since the inhabitants of Facebookistan got all fired up about something–  where are you now Kony2012?— so I was half-delighted and half-disheartened to see the newest brouhaha to hit the social media site, which I’m calling the Facebook Privacy Dis-Agreement (FPD).  As these things tend to happen, FPD had been…

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