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Jun 21

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Exploring Indiana: Terre Haute, Socialism, Art and Death

This summer Jeff and I have been exploring Indiana.  In May, we drove out to the Williamsport Falls with Jeff’s parents (highest free standing falls in Indiana).  We ended up at the Wallace Opry on Highway 341, where the walls are covered with Wheaties boxes dating back to the 70s chronicling history in famous sports figures and all the Indiana sports paraphernalia you could ever want to see.  It’s just a block away from the Wallace covered bridge.

With that trip, we caught the exploring-our-surroundings bug.  Yesterday we went to Terre Haute, a city about the size of Williamsburg, VA, where I went to college.  It’s the home of Indiana State University.  And it boasts that it is the crossroads of America, since routIMG_0691e 40 and route 41 cross here (Indianapolis also calls itself the crossroads of America so I guess it depends what roads you take which city you’ll consider the one where they cross).   Read more

Jun 19

On Juneteenth: History of Race Relations in Indiana

Wednesday night a terrorist attacked a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina.  I was in the middle of working on this post when I heard about it and wondered if in light of current events the subject of this post mattered.  I have come to think that it does.  It seems to me that part of the reason that people think these incidents can be and should be treated as isolated incidents is that we forget our history.  I’m not a historian.  I am sure there are others who know this history better than I do, but I couldn’t find a short condensed history of race relations in Indiana when I went looking for it (except this archive).  I think it is important that we remember our history and how it continues to affect our present.  As Faulkner said, “The past isn’t dead; it isn’t even past.” Another reason I’m writing this is that today is the 150th anniversary of Juneteenth.  Juneteenth is the earliest celebration of commemorating the end of slavery because it was on June 19, 1865 that Union soldiers showed up in Galveston, TX and informed the slaves that they were free, two years after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.  I used to live in Texas, where I learned about Juneteenth, but now I live in Indiana.  I’m from Philadelphia, and I have a pretty good sense of the history (and the present) of race relations in Philadelphia, but when I moved to Texas and Indiana, I wanted to better understand the history of those places.  So I was thrilled when a friend from graduate school who is now a Hoosier, Nazareth Pantaloni, gave me IU history professor James H. Madison’s book: Hoosiers: A New History of Indiana.  Madison spends considerable space addressing the history of race in Indiana (though I was disappointed to see no entry for race or racism in the index). In the spirit of Juneteenth–of learning about emancipation long after it has been declared but does not seem yet to be in force–I want to blog about the history of race relations in Indiana that I learned from Madison’s book.  I just want to give some of the highlights.  I am limiting this list to highlights, especially to highlights that continue to echo in today’s climate. Read more

Jun 12

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What Makes a Woman? Why Do you Ask?

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

May 30

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#HASTAC2015

I just spent three days at Humanities, Arts Sciences and Technology Alliance and Colaboratory (HASTAC) 2015 conference on the theme: “Art and Science of Digital Humanities.”  I did some livetweeting, which I’ve been doing regularly at conferences but mostly I took notes directly to this post which I then edited to summarize my observations on recurring and important themes from the conference.

Observations

  • This might say more about the kinds of conferences I attend, but this is the most diverse conference community I’ve ever seen.
  • Perhaps not surprisingly for a digital humanities project, it’s also the youngest conference crowd I’ve ever seen. There are many more people in literature and languages using digital humanities in their pedagogy and research than any other field.
  • I participated in recurring discussions of importance and difficulty of interdisciplinarity.  Why do we hyperspecialize?  Why do we entrench?  Funding structures and disputes over resources seem to drive divisions that don’t necessarily serve our ends in digital humanities.
  • A woman whose native tongue was not English kept referring to digital humanity in a panel on using digital resources in medieval studies, which got me thinking is our humanity digital?
  • I had several discussions about ambiguity.  Ambiguity is at the heart of humanities.  Does technology excise the ambiguity in a way that is problematic or can it give students more opportunities to struggle with readings and making their own case for how to read or understand a text?

Read more

May 4

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New to You Music in 2015: Anaïs Mitchell, Hadestown

I said at the beginning of the year that I’d listen more to new music and write about it. I did that once so far.  I was a little overwhelmed with all the different new things I should be listening to.  Then in the freshmen colloquium course I taught this semester, we had a class session where we read and listened to protest songs–Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, Bob Dylan, Woodie Guthrie, Rage Against the Machine.  We talked about what makes protest songs work as protest songs.  In the next class meeting, students were asked to bring in their favorite protest songs.  To get things started, I offered my own: Anaïs Mitchell’s “Why We Build the Wall.” Read more

Apr 24

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What Other People Accomplished By My Age

It’s my birthday.  Here’s some things people accomplished by the time they were my age.  I won’t be coy, I’m 39.

  • By 39, Thomas Jefferson, who studied at my alma mater, had written and signed the Declaration of Independence and become the Governor of Virginia.
  • By 39, G.W.F. Hegel had published his seminal text Phenomenology of Spirit.
  • By 39, Sojourner Truth escaped from slavery, moved to New York and became the first black woman to win a case in court against a white man in the United States.
  • By 39, Elizabeth Cady Stanton had organized and held the Seneca Falls Convention where she, Lucretia Mott and several other women drafted the Declaration of Sentiments proclaiming equality between men and women.
  • By 39, Albert Einstein had published his discoveries of the special and general theories of relativity, which revolutionized modern physics.
  • By 39, Barack Obama had been a community organizer for 12 years and an Illinois Senator for 3.
  • By 39, Hillary Rodham Clinton had served as an advisor on the presidential impeachment inquiry for the Judicial Committee of the House of Representatives during Watergate, had taught at the University of Arkansas School of Law and was the First Lady of Arkansas while working as a partner at the Rose Law Firm.
  •  By 39, Judith Butler had published Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter revolutionizing the way that we speak about gender and sexuality.
  • By 39, Annie Dillard had published five books including one of my favorites, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.
  • By 39, my mother had five children.

I leave you these facts without comment.

The painting is “Women VI” by Willem de Kooning whose birthday is today.

Apr 17

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Book Panel at Antioch College TODAY

As part of the GLCA Ancient Philosophy Collaborative Initiative, I and my collaborators Lewis Trelawny-Cassity and Kevin Miles will be discussing my book Aristotle and the Nature of Community tomorrow, April 17, 2015, at Antioch College, MacGregor 149 at 4 PM.  This panel will be convened in conjunction with the philosophy roundtable that meets regularly in Yellow Springs.  I’m posting my comments below:

It’s an honor to be given this time and this venue to discuss my research.  I’m grateful to Lewis Meeks Trelawny-Cassity and to Kevin Miles for the time and the consideration they have given my book.  Kevin Miles was the first person with whom I read the Politics.  Since reading Plato and Aristotle with him as a graduate student, I have found a persisting tension between the project of elucidating the question of a text and offering a sympathetic account of it.  My own interest in developing a positive account of Aristotle’s Politics might seem to repress rather than illuminate the questions of the text.  My drive has been to give the strongest reading in an effort to find an alternative to modern conceptions of political life.  I hope that today and not only today, I can try to get clearer about the questions this reading forces upon us. Read more

Apr 8

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One Sex, Two Sex, Aristotelian Sex: APS’15 talk

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

Apr 2

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Beauty as Liberatory on a Morning Run In Vancouver

Let me just recommend first, philosophy conferences in Vancouver; second, starting your conference off with a good night’s sleep and a long run in the beauty of nature.  I ran 11 miles through Stanley Park and then Vancouver this morning where I’m attending the Pacific American Philosophical Assoication (APA).  As I ran, the view changed from the seawall and evergreens to mountains. It was beautiful. It was stunning. I thought of C.S.Lewis’s claim that beauty produces a need to share it with someone else.  I was out there, running through Stanley Park, thinking, this is amazing, do the others not know about this? I need to capture this so they can see it. I kicked myself for not taking my phone with me.

And it was in that moment where I recognized my desire not just to share it, but to capture it that I was brought up short. I was running without any music or podcasts in my ears so I had plenty of time to think this through. It struck me as I continued to run and to think that beauty exceeds apprehension, not just, as we know from Kant, because it exceeds the boundaries of the concept, but also, because it cannot be had.  It cannot be owned. It cannot become a commodity that I can have that shows something good about me on the basis of having seen it. I reached out to grasp this beauty and I could not hold on to it.  I couldn’t master it. But I wanted to. Beauty is liberating because it disrupts the drive to mastery.

Image above does not do justice, give the proper due, to the beauty of my morning. Taken from the balcony of my room.

Mar 29

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Treading on Ourselves? Government in Aristotle and Contemporary Political Life

Since Rousseau expressed his concern that government, established to carry out the general will of the people, might become a separate body with its own distinct general will, members of the polity have worried from one end of the political spectrum to the other, that government is imposing its will on the people, rather than executing the people’s will.  It’s not even correct to date this concern to Rousseau, since we could argue that such a concern is encapsulated in Thrasymachus’ realpolitik definition of justice — we all know, let’s be honest Socrates, that the laws serve the powerful and not those who are supposed to follow them.  In these cases, government is understood to be against us, treading on us with its laws and impositions, limiting our freedom rather than protecting it.

Government and Constitution in Aristotle

Eric Schwitzgebel refers to Aristotle to talk about blameworthiness for implicit biases in his talk at the Pacific APA next week.  I’m pleased to join in the appeal to Aristotle to think about contemporary political and ethical problems.  My argument is that Aristotle addresses this problem of thinking the government as an imposition by arguing for an account that drives politeuma, or government, closer to an identity with the politeia, constitution or regime.   Read more

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