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Sep 22

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Curating for the Public Philosophy Journal

This week I was the guest curator-at-large for the Public Philosophy Journal.  The Public Philosophy Journal is a website and blog that aims to facilitate public philosophy in the many ways that term could be understood.  One way we understand public philosophy is that public issues and concerns can be served by philosophy’s input and analysis.  Part of that work is bringing content of note to the attention of both philosophers and public servants or others who are working on these issues. I understood such content to concern public issues that philosophy can and does address such as an article in The Globe and Mail about a new study that locates the causes of anorexia nervosa in the passions and suggests a passion-based cure.  The Greeks were themselves very interested in how the care of self was a matter of fostering the passions in the right way, so this convergence of old philosophical ideas and health seemed a good example of public philosophy.  This content also includes references to issues or events that have had influence on philosophy, like Alison Bechdel winning a MacArthur genius award for the Bechdel Test  she invented as a standard to expose how films rarely depict women as characters in themselves unrelated to the men their roles support.  Not only was that important in its own right as a provocative strategy for raising feminist concerns, but Bechdel also influenced the field of philosophy itself, prompting Helen de Cruz to suggest a Bechdel test for philosophy papers.  Another kind of notable content includes philosophers and theorists discussing public issues, such as Avi Alpert’s interview with Gabe Rockhill and Nato Thompson about art and politics and Lisa Guenther on television discussing protests against prisons and the death penalty in Tennessee.  Finally, there is the discussion of public issues within the field of philosophy, issues like being differently-abled in the field or the persistence of rape culture in philosophy departments.  Sometimes public philosophy can even be philosophers taking their work to more public arenas or philosophers being discussed in those arenas, as when Gregory Fried wrote about Heidegger’s Black Notebooks in the LA Times.  I wasn’t focusing on any one of these in particular, but all of them together. Read more

Sep 8

The Gods Must be Crazy and So is Nature

I asked my students to write a paper explaining how Zeus in Hesiod’s Theogony is a model of what a standard for nature is, what such a standard reveals about Hesiod’s view of nature or “the way things are”, and what is difficult about establishing a standard for how things are. I decided I would do this assignment, too, to give them a sense of what I am looking for and for an opportunity to continue blogging about Greek mythology. Read more

Aug 26

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On Thomas Pangle’s New Book: Reading as Eristic

I read Thomas Pangle’s new book, Aristotle’s Teaching in the Politics (University of Chicago Press, 2013), with both great interest and suspicion.  With great interest because with Pangle, I think the Politics needs to be read creatively and imaginatively–an approach which many people seem willing to use in reading Plato but much more reticent to employ in reading Aristotle.  With suspicion because I realized early on in the monograph that Pangle was a Straussian, someone who thinks there are two levels of writing and reading at work–one wherein Aristotle speaks to the common reader and one wherein Aristotle writes for what Pangle calls “the morally serious reader.”  This kind of bifurcation of the world of thinkers and readers worries me for philosophical and political readings.  I began writing this post with the effort to criticize that reading strategy, and I finished realizing that Pangle’s reading of Aristotle was highly provocative, but it didn’t need the Straussian reading approach to get there.  Resorting to that approach explained some difficulties, but also testified to Aristotle’s explicit effort to take into account many varied and competing positions on the meaning of the political and the role of the philosophical. Read more

Aug 22

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Metablogging: Blogging about Academic Blogging

Why I started blogging and how its been more of a benefit that I expected.

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Aug 7

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“It’s the Thought that Counts”: Part II, Truth, its Consequences and the Good

Since I last posted on the question of whether what we think makes us good or bad people, my thoughts keep returning to how difficult this question is.  To reiterate, when I say, what we think might make us good or bad people, I don’t mean whether we think about doing what we might  generally acknowledge to be bad things — that you think about how to hurt someone might set you on the path to being a bad person, or that you think hateful thoughts toward someone is likely to make you hurt them, or you think it is good to get ahead by taking advantage of other people.  I think the value of those kinds of thoughts is less controversial.  What I am considering is whether the ways you think about what is–what we call ontological claims–makes you a good or bad person. Read more

Aug 3

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Trip to Yellowstone National Park

We just  got back from a week in Yellowstone.  We stayed in cabins in the Cinnabar Basin right outside of Gardiner, Montana along the Yellowstone River with my husband’s parents, sister and brother-in-law, their three kids, his aunt and uncle, their two kids and their families and one of his cousin’s husband’s parents.  For twenty-one separate wills vying for satisfaction and recognition, it was a remarkably pleasant week.   Read more

Jul 30

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It’s the Thought that Counts: Do Our Ideas Make Us Good or Bad People?

When I was growing up in the PCA (one of the conservative evangelical – read: fundamentalist – Presbyterian denominations, stands for Presbyterian Church of America), there was a strong sense that thinking the right things about God and about your position in relationship to God was a critical part of being a Christian.

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Jul 22

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The Banality of Evil: Anti-feminism and the Left

Last week, I finally sat down with some friends and watched the 2012 film, “Hannah Arendt,” by Margarethe von Trotta.  The film focuses on Arendt’s trip to Israel to watch the Eichmann trial and the writing of her article for The New Yorker on the trial, Eichmann in Jerusalem.  With nice timing, The New Yorker is making its archives including this article available for a limited time on its website so check it out here.  Arendt argues in that essay that what was most appalling about the trial and about Eichmann and most frightening for a political environment tending more and more to totalitarianism was that Eichmann did not claim to think.   Read more

Jul 21

Pictures from Greece

I’ve curated our pictures from Greece with descriptions here at Flickr.

Jul 9

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On Humans, Non-Humans and the Unity of Nature: Aristotle and Latour

I wrote most of this post in Nafplio, living close to nature.  The photograph is of the abandoned robin’s nest found in our hanging ivy planter.

There’s been a resurgence of conversation in philosophy about the role of the nonhuman in recent years.  I’ll be honest, I haven’t given it that much thought.  But I came to this ah-hah moment the other day in conversation with my lovely husband about sacrifice as the production of the distinction between gods and beasts and the subsequent production of the space in between: the site of the mortal.  How sacrifice does that is complicated (see Vernant, Girard, Burkart and Agamben), but the implication of this account is that the line between the beast and the human (and the god) needs to be produced.   Read more

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