Thinking in Images

On Teaching Our Incapacity To Unexperience

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Aesthetics, Ethics, Film, Open Source Pedagogy, Philosophy, Public Philosophy, RMWMTMBM Archive, SPEP, Teaching, Thinking in Images, Trigger Warnings, Weak Humanism 0 Comments

They say you can’t “unring a bell.” It’s an analogy that is often used to illustrate our incapacity to un-experience things, to erase lived-experiences from our bodies and minds. What I discovered recently is how particularly true that is in the classroom. A few weeks ago in my Philosophy and Film course, we screened Werner…

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Philosophy’s Next Generation of Auteurs

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Digital Humanities, Film, Open Source Pedagogy, Philosophy, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching, Thinking in Images 0 Comments

Once again this semester, I assigned short-film projects to the students in my Existentialism course.  And once again, the products of that assignment (which I only just finished grading) were amazing.  I’ve employed this assignment in select courses for the last several years and each year the students’ films have gotten more and more impressive. …

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Concepts in Motion (or, Why You Should Assign Short-Films in Philosophy Courses)

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Film, Open Source Pedagogy, Philosophy, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching, Thinking in Images 0 Comments

“I say that I do philosophy, which is to say that I try to invent concepts.  What if I say, to you who do cinema: what do you do?” –Gilles Deleuze French philosopher Gilles Deleuze famously speculated in Cinema 1 (1983) that what he called the “movement-image,” a unique creative product of cinema, makes it…

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Thinking In Images

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Open Source Pedagogy, Philosophy, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching, Thinking in Images 3 Comments

I was at a dinner party recently with colleagues and, per usual, the conversation at some point turned to bemoaning students’ sometimes less-than-ideal language skills. The complaints were standard fare– what ever happened to proper grammar? to sophisticated and orderly essay construction? to close and careful reading skills? to the capacity for clearly translating ideas…

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Philosophy, Done Another Way

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching, Thinking in Images 0 Comments

As I mentioned a little while ago on this blog, I gave students in my Existentialism course this semester the option of making a short film for extra credit. The motivation for this was my frustration, in previous iterations of this course, with what I viewed as a deficiency on my part of adequately capturing…

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