Here’s one thing I will presume that we can all agree upon: every single one of us likes to have our views, positions, arguments and preferences confirmed by others. (If you don’t, then those aren’t your views, positions, arguments or preferences in any really defensible sense, are they?) Of course, because we live in a…
Read MoreI was recently asked by a colleague, Dr. Lisa Guenther (Philosophy, Vanderbilt University), to add my signature to an open letter to Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam, petitioning him to suspend the scheduled execution of 10 inmates beginning in January. I agreed to lend my name to the petition alongside several others in a coalition named…
Read MoreI almost titled this “Once More Into The Breach, Part Deux” in reference to my Once More Into The Breach, Dear Friends post from last week, which criticized the way in which conversations about gender disparity in professional Philosophy continue to be framed by concept-distorting and argument-disfiguring gender essentialism. My targets today are not “philosophers”…
Read More[Disclaimer: I haven’t read any of the books in Suzanne Collins’ wildly popular Hunger Games trilogy, though I did see the first movie version of that trilogy (The Hunger Games) last year and I just saw the second film, currently out in theaters, Catching Fire. I’ll go ahead and stipulate that the books are probably…
Read MorePrompted by a recent piece on newAPPS, I’m (somewhat reluctantly) forced to acknowledge the renewed attention to a not-at-all-new phenomenon in the world of Philosophy over the last couple of years, namely, the dramatic under-representation of women in our profession. Here’s what you need to know up front, assuming that some of you readers are…
Read MoreLet 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…
Read MoreI 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…
Read MoreRebecca 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…
Read MoreI’ve never been in a fist-fight in my entire life but, yesterday, I received my first black eye. I got my black eye roughly 48 hours ago now, on what just so happened to be the last day of my College’s Fall break, which ended Tuesday evening. I spent the entire evening on Tuesday with…
Read MoreAs 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…
Read More
Recent Comments