RMWMTMBM Archive

What Is Philosophy?

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, RMWMTMBM Archive 18 Comments

A strange confluence of events recently has led me to consider more seriously the question above: What is philosophy? One might think that this is a perennial question within the discipline of Philosophy, but one would be wrong. Truth is, most of us (professional philosophers) are too busy teaching/researching/thinking about our own projects, the history…

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REPOST: Picking A Fight… Like A Girl

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching, Women and Gender Issues 4 Comments

[NOTE: This is a post that was originally published on this blog a year ago (10/08/09), which I am re-posting now because of recent interest in the newly-developed and eminently revealing What Is It Like To Be A Woman In Philosophy? blog. It is interesting to me to see this issue resurface with such force…

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Morehouse Mean Girls

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching, Women and Gender Issues Comments Off on Morehouse Mean Girls

I’ll admit that I hesitated, more than once– more than a dozen times, to be honest– before posting this entry. So, allow me a few caveats here at the start. First, I’m not a Morehouse grad, not even a Spelman grad– two of the most prestigious HBCU’s in the country– and I can appreciate that…

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One World (Stand By Me)

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Music, RMWMTMBM Archive 1 Comment

This is one of the greatest things I’ve seen on the old interwebs in a long, long time. It’s a collaborative recording of “Stand By Me,” the familiar Ben E. King standard, with musicians and vocalists from all over the globe contributing. Here it is, for those of you who may still doubt that some…

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The Uncanny Valley 6: Unreal and Unreal-er, or, Why a “Fake” Fake Isn’t Uncanny

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Music, Philosophy, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, RMWMTMBM Archive, Uncanny Valley 2 Comments

I made a brief mention in my last uncanny valley post about the difference between “real” music, by which I mean music played on actual (i.e. “real,” material or physical) musical instruments by musicians (i.e. human beings with some skill on those instruments, availing themselves of said instruments without superadded technological assistance) on the one…

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The Uncanny Valley 5: Double, Double, Toil and Trouble

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, RMWMTMBM Archive, Uncanny Valley 4 Comments

Over the course of the last year or so, I’ve written several posts about the “uncanny valley” on this blog. The theory of the uncanny valley is loosely based on Freud’s account of Das Unheimliche (the “uncanny”), a major trope of psychoanalytic theory and a favorite play-thing of literary, film and cultural theorists who borrow…

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200,000-Strong Bartlebys Unite To Say: “Meh”

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Obama, Philosophy, Politics, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, RMWMTMBM Archive 8 Comments

The much-ballyhooed “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear”— brainchild of America’s Ironists-in-Chief Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert— came and went this past Saturday in Washington, DC. Although the crowd-count estimates vary (as they always do), most put the number at somewhere between 200,000 and a quarter-million attendees. (TRANSLATION: For Midwesterners, that’s somewhere between the total…

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Bon Mots: Delueze on Philosophy

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Bon Mots, RMWMTMBM Archive Comments Off on Bon Mots: Delueze on Philosophy

In the interview “On Philosophy” in Negotiations (Columbia University Press, 1995, p.136), Deleuze remarks: Philosophy is always a matter of inventing concepts. I’ve never been worried about going beyond metaphysics or any death of philosophy. The function of philosophy, still thoroughly relevant, is to create concepts. Nobody else can take over that function. Philosophy has…

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Exercise Your Franchise!

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Obama, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive Comments Off on Exercise Your Franchise!

If you didn’t “early vote” before, please take the time to go to your local polling place today and exercise your franchise. As Tom Stoppard once wrote: “It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting.” But if you don’t vote, you can’t be counted. Stop. Think. Vote.

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Deconstructing Sasha Fierce

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Music, Open Source Pedagogy, Philosophy, Politics, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching, Women and Gender Issues 10 Comments

I’m guessing that many of us have those fleeting fantasies from time to time in which we conjure up what we imagine would be the AWESOMEST. COURSE. EVER. For example, my fantasy courses: “I’m Not Here To Make Friends: Ethics and Reality TV” (sort of a cross between ethical theory, applied ethics, and existentialism), or…

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