Given that this is generally the first thing I think of when the topic of White Privilege comes up, I'm very surprised that I never brought it up during the discussion. I guess all those "readings" must have distracted me. Enjoy! WHITE LIKE ME from Ephraim on Vimeo. Continue Reading …
Merleau-Ponty Used to Explain “Deadpool”
Watch on YouTube. Deadpool is all meta, i.e., he knows he's in a movie/comic book. Mike Rugnetta of the Reasonably Sound podcast thinks this isn't just a matter of the comic's writers being much too impressed with their own cleverness, but that being in such constant pain due to his particular superpower/mutation has actually given him a higher level of awareness. Or maybe Continue Reading …
a note on The Latest Zizek Thing
The New Statesman is a ‘British political and cultural magazine’ – it’s mostly a place for budding writers to attempt journalism, or sarcastic British public intellectuals to write editorials. It’s the kind of place where articles begin with a tid-bit of academic general knowledge, a theoretical curio, which is immediately dispensed with when the underequipped authors drop Continue Reading …
Ricoeur on the “Second Naïveté”
If you were curious and confused as I was when Law started talking about the "second naïveté" on our Ricoeur episode, check out this page for a quick explanation. We start out (with the "first naïveté") taking all these religious fairy stories at face value. We then grow up and acquire critical distance, which not only involves applying what we've learned by actually dealing Continue Reading …
Intellectual Character and the So-Called Hot Hand Fallacy
Quassim Cassam wants you to know that conspiracy theorists have bad character. In other words, bad thinking is not just bad thinking; it’s also a vice. Maybe Cassam is right. Intellectual character or the lack thereof is often overlooked, at least in general conversation. It’s not that we have an overabundance of trust and tolerance in our public discourse, which is obvious to Continue Reading …
Philosophical Crumbs 03/17/2015: Heidegger, Chuang Tzu, Sex and Promises
This is intended to be the first token of a new type of post at PEL: a roundup of recent philosophical activity on the Internet that may be interest to our readers. The introductions and comments provided here come from much-too-cursory readings of the things they link to; objections, preferably in the form of new blog posts, are invited. The title come from Kierkegaard's Continue Reading …
Philosophy in Mobile Games: Two Great Ways To Waste Time And Still Feel Mentally Engaged
There are days you sit down on the subway with your copy of Leviathan or [insert current reading here], think “I woke up too late to get coffee; the hell with this,” and turn your off your brain. Good news; there are video games for your phone that will keep your mind engaged while you solve simple puzzles or kill monsters. In all seriousness, this is good stuff. These two Continue Reading …
This Philosophical Melancholy
"The world of the happy is a different world than the world of the unhappy." Ludwig Wittgenstein "Boring" is one of the kinder things that can be said about conventions of the American Philosophical Association. That these meetings are arduous ordeals for newly minted PhDs seeking academic jobs goes without saying; but I've heard even comfortably tenured professors describe Continue Reading …
The Eternal Relativism of the Freshman Mind
Everyone with experience as a humanities professor is aware of the "it's all relative" mantra of college freshmen. Justin McBrayer believes that their moral relativism in particular -- the fact that they don't believe in "moral facts" -- is attributable to lapses in their K-12 public schooling. I doubt it. Like the philosopher Michael Sandel, I see such relativism as Continue Reading …
How To Survive a Philosopher Attack
The Philosiologist has some useful information that readers of this blog may want to share with their friends and loved ones. She describes the phenomenon: I don’t know how many times we’ve been at a philosophy party when I wander back to my philosopher after making the rounds of conversation with other non-philosophers, I discover that he is in heated and angry-sounding Continue Reading …
The Montaigne Project
In 2011, Dan Conley started, and completed, My Montaigne Project: a series of 107 essays, one a day for 107 days, each inspired by one of Montaigne's 107 Essais. The project almost, but not quite, landed him a book deal; this week he brought it back to the web with a newly designed website. He's writing some new essays; intends to focus, among other things, on Montaigne's Continue Reading …
A Solution to the Washington Redskins’ Name Problem
Overseas fans scroll to the end for context. Last Thursday the Washington football team lost 45-14 to the NY football Giants. The game was nationally televised and, as has so often happened in the last 20 or so years, the Redskins failed to rise to the occasion. After another embarrassing beatdown by a hated rival I, a long suffering fan, am ready yet again to renounce my Continue Reading …
Nadler on Immortality for Maimonides vs. Spinoza
I'd like to clarify my comment on the podcast about how the emphasis on rationality as it regards the afterlife is common to Maimonides and Spinoza. I'm looking here at a review by Martin Lin of Steven Nadler's book Spinoza's Heresy: Immortality and the Jewish Mind. Now, Nadler is my go-to local Spinoza scholar--you can see him here and here--and he's the guy Seth was Continue Reading …
How Not to Be a Public Intellectual: Amartya Sen’s Terrible Piece in the New Republic
I'm not going to assess the policy merits of Nobel Prize-winning economist (and aspiring philosopher) Amartya Sen's piece in the New Republic, Stop Obsessing About Global Warming. Because as a lengthy and repetitious series of platitudes calling for a more “rational assessment” of the problem, it doesn’t possess any substantive merits or demerits. What interests me is how Continue Reading …
Inverting the Gaze: Pagan Political Philosophy
[From Michael Burgess, edited by Seth.] A traditional means of founding political or moral philosophies in the west has been the construction of a point from which we can be seen and judged. This is an internalization and politicization of the Christian God who surveys and intervenes in his creation: we are always under the gaze of God and must therefore be Good. For Hume this Continue Reading …
Ecce Zizek! Feynman Homo
In the normal functioning of intellectual discourse we expect interlocutors to obliterate themselves before the alter of the Eternal Progress of Human Wisdom, that is, people should not feature amongst that which we praise, contemplate or idolize. That a particular person has offered us an idea is a purely contingent fact: he is merely at the right place and time to do it and Continue Reading …
Google Scholar citations–a measure of academic importance:
A scan of Google Scholar revealed the following citations since 2009 for philosophers: Rawls: 250,000 Quine: 146,000 Kant: 119,000 Rorty: 105,000 Foucault: 62,300 Nietzsche: 38,500 Hegel: 38,500 Heidegger: 38,300 Derrida: 26,900 Wittgenstein: 25,400 Deleuze: 23,600 Husserl: 20,000 Lacan: 21,300 Gadamer: 16,600 Zizek: 15,400 What are we to conclude from this Continue Reading …
Free Will Worth Having
What are your thoughts on machines that can predict what you're going to do in the next five minutes? Do you think that everything that happens now in the universe was causally determined by some event(s) that happened before it? When professional philosophers check people's intuitions it looks as though sometimes people generally agree that we have free will even if the Continue Reading …
Convenience, Thought and Technology
No-one could argue that technology does not make our lives easier, or that technology has not been one of the great liberators in the history of humankind; it certainly has been. Our lives would be more solitary, poorer, nastier, more brutish and shorter without technology, to steal a line from Hobbes. We should hope for continued advances in this liberating sort of technology, Continue Reading …
Originality, Music and Noise: Some References
I am a regular listener of the show, and my dad, Jonathan White, has even been a guest (episode 72, "Terrorism"). I am a music history professor at Mercer University and became very excited when the discussion on episode 94 focused on music and, in particular, two major issues: 1) music and noise; 2) music and the cult of originality (which in turn suggests an exploration of Continue Reading …