Animal Cruelty
In a comment to the previous post, Chris Robinson makes reference to a poem from my book Magical Thinking. We bear a special responsibility, greater perhaps than the responsibility we bear toward each other, to care for animals. Whichever philosopher said that we reveal our character through our treatment of those weaker than ourselves was [...]
Argument & the Liberal Arts
In looking for something else a few days ago, I came across this discussion by Joseph Kugelmass (at the wittily named Kugelmass Episodes weblog) & thought I’d make note of it here. It’s a response to some passages in Michael Bérubé’s What’s Liberal about the Liberal Arts? that honors Bérubé while disagreeing with him. I [...]
Potsdam (NY) to Portland (ME) in 20 Hours
What was supposed to be a six hour trip down to Boston & up to Portland for the SLSA conference turned into a 20 hour marathon yesterday when my Delta commuter plane from Ogdensberg had to go back to the hanger for repairs. I didn’t get out of Ogdensberg until late in the afternoon and [...]
Baseball’s Christianist Assholes; Or: Go Boston!
I was getting ready to root for the Rockies in the World Series, partly because I love a newcomer / underdog & partly because I think more than one championship a century would be bad for Boston’s soul. And then Michael O’Hare at the RBC blog had to ruin my (admittedly superficial) fan-affiliation by linking [...]
Reading for Pleasure
Note: I began this post back in May, but just looked at it again in the context of the paper I’m writing on teaching Intro to Lit. I’ve added the second paragraph, which is mostly John Dewey, to the first, written earlier.
Timothy Burke taught a course called The History of Reading last semester & has [...]
Against Stoicism
Steve Gimbel at Philosopher’s Playground, has a recent post about the Stoic Epictetus. Reading that in combination with this piece in The Smart Set about “longevity hot spots” got me thinking about my own approach to ordinary pleasures, especially eating & drinking. When you hit your fifties you start thinking about how long you’ll live. [...]
Priorities: Xbox / Myanmar
Refusing to Snip the Essentialist Thread, Or: “Pinker Broaches the Knotty Question of Metaphor”
Douglas Hofstadter’s review of Stephen Pinker: The old reductionist superstar passes the torch to the new reductionist superstar, while taking a swipe at George Lakoff, who has the intellectual honesty to admit that, “Yes, ma’am, it’s metaphor all the way down” Both Hofstadter & Pinker are trying to make the world safe for Minksy’s version [...]
Good Question
The Philosopher’s Playground asks a question I’ve thought about a good deal over the years, probably because I was raised as a fire & brimstone Protestant before turning into a live & let live hippie. Is there a statute of limitations on bad acts? And, more broadly, what is the nature of confession & forgiveness? [...]
Foucault’s Anti-Romantic Politics
Foucault Blog has a useful post detailing a particular right-wing attack (by David Frum) on Foucault, but which is also useful as an entry point for understanding the philosopher’s politics of doubt.
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