I’m reaching the end of a semester-long sabbatical, and will soon have to start thinking about preparing for the courses that I will be teaching in the spring semester. I love teaching. However, this time I’m rather less enthusiastic about climbing back in the academic saddle.
British psychoanalyst Donald Woods Winnicott wrote in a review of Carl Jung’s memoir Memories, Dreams, and Reflections: “I was sane, and…through analysis and self-analysis I achieved some measure of insanity.” How do we make sense of this strange claim?
Why on earth would anybody want to get rid of the word “racism”? It seems like a perfectly fine word. In fact, it seems like a morally valuable word. If racism is a morally bad thing, then having the language to address it—to track it, analyze it, condemn it, and call it out—must be a good thing, right?
The idea of fighting against hate has had a lot of traction in the public sphere. But conceptualizing our current political situation as a fight against hate paints a distorted picture of what we’re up against and underestimates the ideological wellsprings of right-wing extremism.
In a recent speech, Trump painted a picture of humanoid predatory animals hell-bent on torturing, killing, and raping beautiful, innocent teenage girls. Trump’s speech should not be regarded as the return of the superpredator idea, because the idea that young Black and Latino males are roving, predatory beasts never really disappeared.
The belief that some things are natural while others are unnatural is part of the common currency of human thought, but we rarely pause to consider exactly what it means to say that something is unnatural. It’s important to do so because this concept is politically very potent.
Students of philosophy might sometimes get frustrated because they don’t get definitive answers to the sorts of questions that philosophers ask. But are these frustrations based on a misconception of the relationship between truth and progress in philosophy?
Hillary Clinton, E.T., and the Terminator walk into a bar, and plop themselves down on stools, and they each order a beer. How do physicalist theories of mind explain what’s going on in their respective minds? Read our third and final installment on the mind-body problem to find out.
If the mind and the body are two separate things, as substance dualists believe, then how are the two connected to one another? Part 2 of our blog series on the mind-body problem.
You have a mind and you have a body. What’s the connection between the two?…
Can philosophers help us come to grips with Trump and our current political situation? Tune…
This essay is a lot more personal than any of my previous postings on this blog—or, indeed, any my writing anywhere else. It’s personal because it concerns a topic that is so important to me that I cannot bear to shroud it in a pretense of academic detachment and so overwhelmingly significant that the thought of writing about anything else seems grotesque.
Around this time of year, many parents—God only knows how many—lie to their children about Santa Claus. But aren’t we always trying to teach our children that lying is wrong? So shouldn’t we stop lying about Santa?
Perhaps the most remarkable (and, for many, alarming) political event in 2015 has been the…
The notion of ideology is very important in political thought, as well as in everyday…
Most philosophical work on race concentrates on two questions. The first is the question of…