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…
Read MoreOne thing you CANNOT say about Memphis is that it doesn’t have a sense of humor about politics. Especially mayoral politics. Remember, this is a town that has not one, but TWO, mayors (one for the city and another for the county). We also had the same Memphis City Mayor, Willie Herenton, for five consecutive…
Read More[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….
Read More[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…
Read MoreYou may remember my mentioning a couple of months ago on this blog (“Video Killed the Philosophy Professor“) that I had my first experience shooting a music video for one of my original songs. Well, here’s the final product. Directed by Dana Gabrion and Chris Morgan. Photography by Chris Morgan. Starring: Max Maloney, Marlinee Iverson,…
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 MoreThe memorial service for Michael Jackson is being broadcast on television here in the United States today and, not surprisingly, there is mixed reaction from talking heads and the public. There is no denying that Michael Jackson will go down in history as the archetype of a “pop icon,” nor that he was an almost-unrivaled…
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 MoreJust a reminder that the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay is still open and operating. President Obama, as one of his first acts in office, vowed to close the facility within the year… but there are still over 200 detainees waiting there. It’s still unclear what awaits them, though, when they are released. The…
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