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Corey McCall
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Corey McCall
Associate Professor of Philosophy
Elmira College
Open Letter on the University of Oregon graduate union strike
I am really proud to co-sign this Open Letter by Mark Alfano on the University of Oregon Graduate Teaching Fellows Federation strike. (See here at Lawyers Guns and Money and here at Daily Nous for background. Also here for a GTFF cease-and-desist letter on the threat to international graduate st...
You might want to check out Eric Cazdyn's The Already Dead. I've only just started it, but it seems to address many of the contemporary issues you mention: http://www.amazon.com/Already-Dead-Politics-Culture-Illness/dp/0822352281/ref=sr_1_sc_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1414863386&sr=1-1-spell&keywords=Eric+kazdyn
Hegel versus the zombies
I wonder the extent to which Hegelianism only makes sense in a world without widespread vaccination and anti-biotics, the two things that (up till now) have done the most to increase life expectancy in the West. In a world where most people pass away before late middle age, and nobody lives int...
I've used literature in a couple courses. In my Bioethics course, I've used Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go as well as Simon Mawer's Mendels' Dwarf. Mawer's book more explicitly addresses bioethical questions, while Ishiguro's book is more of an Existential novel within a bioethics framework.
Another book I've used in Environmental Ethics is Rob Nixon's Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. I plan to use it again, but I hope to use it in conjunction with some of the texts that Nixon analyzes by authors such as Ken Saro-Wiwa, Jamaica Kincaid, and Indra Sinha.
Using Fiction in Philosophy Reading Lists
By Samir Chopra In my post yesterday, I had written of how discussion centering on a classic philosophical debate could be sparked by a reading of fiction. (The upper-tier core class I'm teaching, Philosophical Issues in Literature, is of course, all about that!) But fiction features in anot...
Never mind. Having actually read the piece, I see the problem Monk would have with my simplistic solution. Still, it seems we are talking about least three different things here: two kinds of general understanding and a particular kind. Wittgenstein wouldn't want to identify understanding a sentence with the synthesizing activity of philosophy, would he?
Monk on scientism and Wittgenstein
Nice discussion here. Since I'm not a naturalist, I'm sort of on Monk/Wittgenstein's side, but I find some of the dichotomies to be a little bit tendentious. Monk opposes "non-theoretical understanding" to the kind of understanding proper to science, and argues that naturalizing programs in phi...
Interesting post. Regarding your first point: couldn't Monk simply counter by saying that music theory and music performance (as well as composition) are very different activities, and that the former strives for a level of generality that the latter does not?
Monk on scientism and Wittgenstein
Nice discussion here. Since I'm not a naturalist, I'm sort of on Monk/Wittgenstein's side, but I find some of the dichotomies to be a little bit tendentious. Monk opposes "non-theoretical understanding" to the kind of understanding proper to science, and argues that naturalizing programs in phi...
Please add my name: Corey McCall, Elmira College
The next step to support academic freedom in the Salaita case
What say you, philosophers? Corey Robin proposes we write to Illinois to say we won't visit their campus until Salaita is reinstated. If you're willing to co-sign the following please email me at protevi@lsu.edu, PM me on FB, or comment below. "Dear Chancellor Wise: we the undersigned will not v...
Have you read Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story? Great on a near-future America in decline that feels awfully like the America of today.
This is the way the world ends. . .
I've long been obsessed with what it would have been like to be a Saxon in post-Roman Britain. Roman concrete was so good that for hundreds of years Saxons inhabited Roman buildings. But their architectural wherewithal was primitive compared to the Romans, so as the roofs collapsed on the Roman...
We discussed this interesting podcast in my Philosophy of Natural and Social Science course and an interesting question came up: Papineau does not clarify whether the realism/anti-realism debate applies to theories or entities or both. It seems that he is discussing the distinction at the level of theory, but this could be clearer. Do the terms of the debate change when we are focused on the level of entities rather than the level of theories?
David Papineau on Scientific Realism
Do subatomic particles really exist? Or are they convenient fictions that explain observable phenomena? David Papineau discusses arguments for and against scientific realism in this episode of Philosophy Bites. Listen to David Papineau on Scientific Realism
But surely Heidegger was aware of this connotation of Holzwege as Irrwege? I'd like to think that he was, as it might mitigate some of the less flattering characteristics of his prose. Arguing against this possibility, however, is that Heidegger is one of the least ironic of philosophers (odd, that, from someone who read so much Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and was clearly influenced by both).
Forest Paths
I've long held that much of Heidegger's popularity has to do with his mystifying use of language, a use that he draws from the best tradition of German poetry, but that, applied for the aims of positive philosophy, yields nothing more than genre confusion. This mystification is often overempha...
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