Philosophy

What’s SPEP Got To Do With It?

Ahhhh, SPEP. It’s a guilty pleasure for most of us. The Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy conferences happen only once every year, and for folks like me anyway, it’s about the only chance I get to see my far-flung friends. Sure, it’s also a chance to reunite with the Continental Philosophy Diaspora, to see…

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Strategic Misreading

I used to say that one of the things I both loved and hated about philosopher Richard Rorty’s work was that he was a master of what I call “strategic misreading.” If you’ve ever read Rorty’s famous foray into the “Continental” (European) philosophical tradition, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity, you may have some sense of what I…

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Debating the κανών

I’m giving the discussions of Hillary Clinton and strategic misreading a rest for a bit to make room for another, more immediately pressing, question of mine. What counts as the central “canonical” text of Platonism? Let me set the stage for this question: At my academic home, we have a great-books-ish series of courses that…

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Gift-Giving Gone Wrong

As much as I love this time of the year, and I genuinely do, I really hate shopping for gifts. I’m not a very enthusiastic or patient shopper, and the malls drive me crazy. Also, I always want to get people the perfect gift, but more often than not find that such gift is either…

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I Hear Monkeys…

The story about my niece yesterday reminded me of another “monkey” story that I had been meaning to post here. But first, you need some background information. Rhodes College, where I teach, is in Midtown Memphis, which just so happens also to be the location of the world-famous Memphis Zoo. The college sits on one…

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Nanophilosophy

What is “nanophilosophy”? Nanophilosophy is the search for and study of very, very small philosophical questions. It was begun by the Department of Philosophy at the University of Waterloo in an attempt to drag our age-old discipline kicking and screaming into the 21st Century. The Century of Very Small Things. I think this is a…

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“Fishing” and The Art of Misdirection

My oh my! I am seriously impressed with the flurry of activity on my friends’ blogs in the week that I’ve been away from this one. (Especially nice posts by Ideas Man on what’s really wrong with Mormonism, and by chet on the death of the author/artist.) As chet rightly pointed out to me, I…

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The Most Photographed Barn in America

I read Don DeLillo’s 1985 masterpiece White Noise as an undergraduate in an American Lit course at the University of Memphis about ten years ago now. I was still developing my postmodern muscles at the time, and I loved DeLillo’s novel, despite its overly stylized and sometimes too-precious prose. In particular, I loved the very…

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Why Do We Love the Anti-Hero?

Remember Han Solo? That smarmy, proud, devil-may-care mercenary from the “Stars Wars” movies? As best I can remember, I think he’s the first “anti-hero” I loved. After Han, I think the next one for me was the narrator of Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground. Since then, I’ve been collecting them like some sort of neurotic hobbyist….

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The Trouble With Fossils

First, a caveat: The following post is NOT intended, primarily, to advocate or oppose any particular Presidential candidate. A couple of days ago, NPR correspondent Robert Seigel interviewed Presidential candidate Mitt Romney. (You can read the transcript of the interview here.) Initially, it seemed like the main focus of Seigel’s questions was Romney’s health care…

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