As I recounted in my first post on the uncanny valley, I learned of this phenomenon from a student in one of my classes. I can’t remember the exact context of his bringing it up– it had something to do with our knowledge of the outside world as contested, and then proven, by Descartes in…
Read MoreI think if you asked my students to name one single value that I hold, passionately, they would say: “She HATES lazy relativism.” I deliver my diatribe against lazy relativism in every class– usually multiple times– to the point where I actually feel sorry for students who have taken my classes more than once and…
Read MoreAfter posting my bit on lazy relativism yesterday, my good friend and colleague, economist Prof. Art Carden (who also blogs regularly over at Division of Labour), sent me the following email: I really, really enjoyed your post on “lazy relativism” and have a suggestion for a followup that would help non-experts like myself: what’s “non-lazy…
Read MoreAt the beginning of the 2008 film Doubt (an adaptation of John Patrick Shanley’s play by the same name), a priest challenges his congregation with an unorthodox sermon about the nature of the ties that bind us together. Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) asks his flock: “What do you do when you’re not sure? ”…
Read MoreI was talking to one of my colleagues recently about our shared concern for demonstrating to students that “philosophy” and “religion” (or theology, or religious studies, or whatever) are different disciplines. Although they sometimes address the same subject matter, and although there is much in religion that is philosophical and much in philosophy that is…
Read MoreI’m working on the chapter of my manuscript that traces the genealogy of human rights discourse through the Enlightenment, and I had the opportunity today to re-read Descartes’ Letter of Dedication that prefaces his Meditations on First Philosophy. What a hoot! (Admittedly, I may be getting a little punchy and it might not be that…
Read MoreCarlin Romano (Univ. of Pennsylvania) recently wrote an excellent piece for The Chronicle of Higher Education heralding President Obama as our first “Philosopher-in-Chief,” an honorific given to him largely as a result of the nuanced cosmopolitanism that characterized his Cairo speech entitled “A New Beginning” (full text and video of that address here). I was…
Read MoreLast year, in my section of our College’s great books program (which is called “The Search for Values”), I taught Michel Foucault’s Fearless Speech for the first time. The book is an edited volume comprised of six lectures that Foucault delivered at the University of California-Berkeley in the fall of 1983, all centered around the…
Read MoreListening to the Digital Dialogue conversation about Identity the other day, coupled with reading way-too-many of the “comments” sections on the Skip Gates’ arrest story, has gotten me thinking a lot about the merits and demerits of online anonymity. Anyone who spends more than a second on the Internet surely knows the drawbacks– “flame” wars,…
Read MoreFriend and fellow philosopher-blogger Chris Long (Pennsylvania State University) has started a really interesting project that he’s calling “Socratic Politics in Digital Dialogue,” which is a series of philosophical conversations/interviews that Chris is making available as podcasts. (You can subscribe on iTunes by searching for “Digital Dialogues” under the podcast section.) This is a summer…
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