Relativism

The Fine Line Between Proselytizing and Parody: On “Roseanne”

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Democracy, Ethics, Philosophy, Politics, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, Public Philosophy, Race and Racism, Relativism, RMWMTMBM Archive, Television, Women and Gender Issues 0 Comments

Two decades after its season “finale” in 1997, Roseanne made its triumphant return to prime-time television this past Tuesday night.  More than 18 million people tuned in (including President Trump) and, if the hot takes are to believed, most people loved it (including President Trump). Critics have attributed the largely positive reception of Roseanne to its sympathetic…

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Relativism, Revolutionary Fictionalism, Moral Facts and #TheDress

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Aesthetics, Ethics, Open Source Pedagogy, Philosophy, Politics, Relativism, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching, Technology 0 Comments

[Disclaimer: this post is a brief, quickly-composed and so incomplete response to a number of tangentially-related events and essays from the last several days.  I have a lot more to say about all of them, including how they are not merely tangentially-related, but not now.] If you haven’t already, you should read yesterday’s Stone article in the…

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The “Real” and “True” You

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Digital Humanities, Film, Philosophy, Politics, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, Relativism, RMWMTMBM Archive, Technology, Weak Humanism 0 Comments

Last week, my Philosophy and Film class took up the theme of “documentary truth.”  In preparation for our Tuesday night seminar, students were required to choose one film from a list of documentaries (Grizzly Man, The Thin Blue Line, Night and Fog, Bowling for Columbine, Capturing the Friedmans, Man on Wire, Super Size Me, Ghosts…

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I Do Not Think That Word Means What You Think It Means

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Relativism, RMWMTMBM Archive, The Search for Values 5 Comments

I’m not ashamed to admit that philosophers can be quite persnickety in our insistence upon precision in language. Much of what we do, after all, involves precisely defining things, concepts, meanings, values, processes, systems, states of being and the like. That’s not to say that we are actually settled on precise definitions for everything; in…

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Lazy Relativism, Again

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Politics, Relativism, RMWMTMBM Archive 9 Comments

As readers of this blog (and students in my classes) know well, I hate lazy relativism. I readily concede that there are lots of things about which we cannot know the Absolute Truth (s’il y en a), but regardless of the strengh or weakness of any particular truth-claim, it will ALWAYS be the case that…

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Right, Real, True… and Other Relative Terms

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson AnPan and RMWMTMBM, Philosophy, Relativism, RMWMTMBM Archive, Weak Humanism 2 Comments

Lest I get too comfortable with my tiny, marginally-significant place in the blogosphere, thinking that we’re all friends here and readers of this blog are basically in agreement on the stuff that really matters, all of us interacting virtually in a kind of harmonious echo-chamber of progressive philosophical wonderment… yeah, lest I get too comfortable…

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Relative To What?

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson AnPan and RMWMTMBM, Philosophy, Relativism, RMWMTMBM Archive 1 Comment

This will be brief, as I am now in the midst of grading, but I wanted to address AnPan’s response to my response on the whole issue of (his) moral realism versus (my) moral relativism before too much time passed. I think we may have the beginning of a rapprochement after reading AnPan’s last rebuttal,…

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Lazy Relativism

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson AnPan and RMWMTMBM, Philosophy, Relativism 4 Comments

I 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…

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Strong Relativism

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson AnPan and RMWMTMBM, Philosophy, Relativism 3 Comments

After 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…

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