Arbitrary Marks

This morning in class, as an effort to get the students thinking about John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarian philosophy, I asked them to make a list of five things they need to be happy. It could be as abstract as “freedom” and as concrete as “food”, I said. Then they were to rank them and turn to a neighbor to compare. I expected at least some major differences in rankings and/or happiness-needs. Take a minute to mentally do the exercise on your own: below the fold, I’ll talk about the results.

I’ll let ck’s introduction stand as is, even if a person would have to have tasted a few bottles of Lafite before she could ever begin to be called a connoisseur. I will, however, present an autobiographical parable which will give you a sense of my cognitive posture, critique of contemporary thought, and my [...]

This post at Philosophy et cetera got me thinking about my own experience in academic social circles. For full context, you want to go to Feminist Philosophers and read the comment thread, then see what Richard has to say about it. But the gist of the problem is this:
A female philosopher complained that [...]

Because of my schedule and because we don’t pay for cable, I rarely watch television. Aside from Thursday nights (comedy done right on NBC), I tend to get my programming through iTunes or Blockbuster. Recently, since I completed season one of Damages, I decided to branch out, back into a genre that I [...]

I ran across this fallacy in re-reading an article by Jay Garfield. He is talking about a Tibetan Buddhist tradition which tries to bring together the work of Dharmakirti and Nagarjuna into a coherent whole. This fallacy runs like:

Philosopher X is really smart. So is Philosophy Y. Therefore, they must both [...]

I’m back from a couple of hours at Atomix, working up an outline for my paper in my notebook (I’ve finally finished the one I started at UMSL, and am now working through a big, black 8 1/2 by 11 sized bound, unlined book). I thought the name of the coffee shop was philosophically [...]

We knew that North Saint Louis isn’t the safest neighborhood, but my partner had been there a few years before (with one of the friends, L, who joined us), and we’ve heard if you stick to the restaurant and daylight hours, you’ll be okay.

Thomas King tells us a story in The Truth about Stories: “It’s about the earth and how it floats in space on the back of a turtle.  I’ve heard this story many times, and each time someone tells the story, it changes.”  Each of the five chapters opens with the same paragraph, and then twists [...]

If anyone’s name was not found written in the bokk (sic) of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire!!! REVELATION 20:15

My preceding posts haven’t been a philosophically rigorous systematization of what I believe.  That’s because I think we revise and reconsider and rearrange our understanding of the world.  I have some pieces which are central, and which would take a lot to shift–humanism, emphasis upon imagination, emotion and reflexive thought, scientific exploration.  Other elements of [...]