Philosophy

Right, Real, True… and Other Relative Terms

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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Relative To What?

This 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,…

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A Parable for “Glorious” Essay-Writers Everywhere

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…

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Heidegger, We Hardly Knew Ya…

The 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…

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What’s Wrong With the World Today?

Last night, I participated in a panel discussion of global issues entitled “What’s Wrong with the World Today?” as a part of Rhodes College’s “Think Globally, Act Locally” week. My co-panelists were two colleagues of mine, one from Economics and one from International Studies. It was a lively and productive discussion, I think, and I…

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Picking A Fight… Like A Girl

The interwebs are all a-buzz right now about women in philosophy. Wait, correction: they’re all a-buzz about the LACK OF women in philosophy. An article by Brooke Lewis in The Philosopher’s Magazine entitled “Where are all the women?” confirms what just about anybody could have guessed: Philosophy departments in the U.S. and U.K. trail FAR…

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The Uncanny Valley

[Update: This post is the first in an ongoing series about the Uncanny Valley.  Click here to read them all.] A couple of weeks ago when I was teaching Descartes’ Meditations, one of my students made reference to something called the “uncanny valley,” which I had never heard of before but which sounded really fascinating….

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The Uncanny Valley 2: Racial Appearances

[This is a continutation of my previous post on the uncanny valley. If you don’t know what the uncanny valley is, you may want to go back and read the previous post first.] In 1931, at the beginning of the dénouement of the Harlem Renaissance, conservative (some would say “reactionary”) African-American author George Schuyler penned…

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Shoe-Buckles and Big Ideas

I usually try to avoid recommending books until I’ve finished reading them, but I am so thoroughly enjoying Sarah Vowell’s The Wordy Shipmates that I’m going to go ahead and jump the gun on this one. Sarah Vowell (regular contributor to PRI’s This American Life and author of Assasination Vacation) is the very best kind…

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