Philosophy

Might and Right

I’ve been invited to speak as one of the panelists in a colloquium entitled “Violence: The American Tradition?” coming up in a little more than a week. I am still working out what it is that I want to say. My co-panelists are a historian and an artist, and we are each expected to address…

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Idiosyncratic Crises

Prefatory disclaimer: I am fully aware that the following “crisis” only legitimately qualifies as a “crisis” for those of us in academia. Which, of course, means that it’s not a crisis at all. I hate, hate, HATE the practice of submitting panel or paper “proposals” for conferences. The way this always works out, or at…

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Mind over Mater

My “Search for Values” class began our section on tragedy at the end of this week with Oedipus Rex. (We’ll read Antigone next week.) Sophocles’ “trilogy” is one of those works of literature that I always need to read again to remember how great it is. Part of that, I think, is due to the…

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Mommy and I Are One

Okay, so I am now willing to retract– or at least severely qualify– my earlier disavowal of psychoanalysis. My sincerist apologies to Sigmund. As you may remember, a few days ago I wondered (in a post entitled “Mind Over Mater“) what was so damn compelling about the Freudian reading of Sophocles’ inimitable tragedy Oedipus Rex?…

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Mourning Again

On this blog, almost exactly a year ago, I posted an entry on the importance of what I called the work of mourning. That post was prompted by my attendance at the SPEP business meeting, which every year includes eulogies of the SPEP members who have passed in the previous year. I was disturbed by…

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American Beauty, Reconsidered

I run the “Philosophy Film Series” (and the corresponding “Pub Talks”) at my college, a task I enjoy so much that it doesn’t even seem like work. I’m always pleasantly surprised to find that our students are very sophisticated film viewers, and my job as the facilitator of our discussions is often impeded by my…

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The Train: American Art’s Lost Muse

There was a film review of the new Wes Anderson flick The Darjeeling Limited last week in The New Yorker in which the reviewer asks: Can you have a thriving movie culture in a country without enough trains? It’s a great question– for those of us interested in all genres of American art. I, too,…

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Why the ocean is sublime (and why it isn’t)

I went to a roundtable the other night on “The Aesthetic” hosted by our English department. As you might expect, much of the discussion was guided by Kant’s Critique of Judgment, supplemented with the requisite considerations of Baumgarten and Burke. At one point, the discussion turned to the “sublime” and, of course, to the ready-to-hand…

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Studenting Redux

I was very pleased to see all of the interest in the To Student, or not to student post! The discussion, much of which was sparked by an initial distinction between a student-who-learns and a student-who-students (a la Sartre’s garçon de café) seemed to concentrate on the “inauthenticity” of the latter. I thought it might…

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To student, or not to student.

A colleague of mine recently alerted me to an interesting passage in Garry D. Fenstermacher’s essay, “Rediscovering the Student in Democracy and Education,” in John Dewey and Our Educational Prospects: A Critical Engagement with Dewey’s Democracy and Education. Fenstermacher suggests imagining that the word “student” might function as a verb or a noun. He writes,…

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