Dec 6
With some help of some Facebook friends, I’ve collected a list of scenes from film and television of fathers or coaches or other male role models shaming younger men for not being manly enough. Here’s the list. It is surely not exhaustive. Add your suggestions in the comments. Read more
Last weekend, Elinor Burkett published an opinion editorial in The New York Times calling into question whether Caitlyn Jenner is really a woman. Sarah Miller points out the many problems with Burkett’s argument over at Jezebel, which I want to point to and double down on here, mostly because I’m put off that even the podcasters over at Slate’s DoubleX had a hard time finding the language to respond eloquently to Burkett. Noreen Malone notes on the podcast that it was the #1 most emailed piece at NYT over the weekend, which is to say: it struck a chord. So I want to say a few things about that chord. Read more
I have of late found myself turning to Aristotle’s biological works to think more carefully about Aristotle’s conception of nature, because I think it is there that the strongest challenge to my reading of physis as the internal principle by which things move from within themselves to fulfill themselves is found.
In the biology, the male semen seems to impose its form on the female menses, suggesting that at the microcosmic level of natural generation, form is imposed on material, external principles master what needs forming. But as I investigate Aristotle’s biology, I have come to learn that material in Aristotle might not be what we’ve thought it was.
On Saturday, April 11, 2015 at 11 AM at the Ancient Philosophy Society meeting at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, I am presenting a paper (part of my current book project) that focuses on the strange and evasive role of vital heat in Aristotle’s biology. I argue that the complexities of vital heat might tell us something about whether Aristotle has a one-sex or two-sex model of sexual difference and that his model might also recast our understanding of Aristotelian material. Read more
The 5th Circuit Federal Appeals Court heard arguments today to determine whether the Texas law that requires abortion clinics in Texas to be ambulatory surgical centers is constitutional. If upheld, the law would cause 80% of abortion clinics in Texas to close, which would mean many Texas women would have to travel hundreds of miles to procure an abortion, as reported by NPR. Many of the women affected are poor, many are Latina, some are undocumented. For many, their only source of healthcare is their local Planned Parenthood. I know this because I used to live in the Rio Grande Valley, one of the places where the local abortion clinic would have to shut down. Read more
I'm Chair and Associate Professor of Philosophy at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana. I work on ancient Greek--mainly Plato and Aristotle--and contemporary European philosophy inflected by social and political concerns. I'm particularly interested in the concept of nature and how historically nature, understood in relation to its apparent opposite of reason, nature, and artifice, has led to conceptions of community that require a founding exclusion. My first book argues that Aristotle's Politicsdraws on a conception of nature that is not opposed to these things and thus not exclusive. My second book considers Aristotle's conception of nature in his account of generation to show the ways that form and matter seem interdependent in the model of a Möbius strip.
I am serious about running. I care about justice, feminism, opposing racism and resisting neoliberalism. I think Socrates was on to something when he suggested thinking was a practice of living. I teach students to think--and to live. I delight in the pleasures of doing the difficult thing.
The Trott Line 