Chuck Klosterman Meet Karl Marx
Posted on | May 7, 2012
Chuck Klosterman and Seth Vannatta, editor of Chuck Klosterman and Philosophy: The Real and the Cereal, discuss all things from jealous academics, the unpredictability of audiences, and Plato’s Ion as Homer’s ‘cover band’ in a recent radio interview. While Klosterman is still getting used to treatment by philosophers who take any sentence he may have written a little too seriously, there’s no doubt that Klosterman is a philosopher (or, better, a sociologist of knowledge) at heart. He’s fascinated, he explains, by the way that certain ideas that keep recurring in human culture and human experience: “To me the most valuble ideas are the ones that people keep coming up with on their own and then later realize there is a sort of a hard antecedent to it,” that some other person, like a philosopher, had seized the idea in question as a basis for their philosophy. It’s almost as if, as Klosterman put it, “the natural experience of living pushes us to those things.” Klosterman is no exception. His next book, I suggest, should be Mötley Crüe and the Relations of Production.
The interview is here, at WZBT, Gettysburg College.
The Good Wife and Philosophy, Call for Abstracts
Posted on | May 2, 2012
Call for Abstracts
The Good Wife and Philosophy
Edited by Kimberly Baltzer-Jaray and Robert Arp
(1) Submit abstracts of no more than 300 words to: robertarp320@gmail.com
(2) Abstracts due: June 15, 2012
(3) Notification of accepted abstracts: July 1, 2012
(4) First drafts due: September 15, 2012 (flexible)
(5) 10 to 12-paged papers are written in a conversational style for a
lay audience (this definitely ain’t no JPhil, Mind, or Nous
publication)
Any relevant topic considered, but here are some possibilities:
- Feminism, Alicia the good wife, and Alicia the litigator
- The good wife, the good husband, sexuality, gender, and societal roles
- Peter, cheating, sexual addiction, and the male psyche
- Alicia, accepting cheating, loyalty, and the female psyche
- Sexual justice and politics in the law
- The use of logical fallacies to influence or manipulate beliefs in
the courtroom
- Memory, testimony, and other forms of evidence
- What is legal vs. what is moral
- Crime scenes and the relationship between deduction, induction, and abduction
- History and rationale for a jury
- Law and game theory in The Good Wife
- Authenticity and identity in The Good Wife
- History and rationale for swearing on a Bible
- The nature and types of law
- The nature and types of justice
- Right to privacy and violations of that right in The Good Wife
- The elements of an action (motive, execution, etc.) and
corresponding punishment
- Pro and con arguments for capital punishment
- Persons, rights, and privileges
- Diane and the gun control issue
- Character formation, virtue ethics, and characters in The Good Wife
- Types of love and/or friendship in The Good Wife
- An analysis of the nature of murder vs. other forms of killing
- Deontological rights-based vs. utilitarian common-good-based themes
in The Good Wife
- The moral perspectives of the various characters in The Good Wife
- “Heart” and care for the uninsured
- “Infamy,” psychological coercion, and responsibility
- “Unplugged” and advance directives
- “Great Firewall,” types of government, and censorship
- “Bitcoin for Dummies” and the morality of client-attorney confidentiality
The Good Wife and Philosophy will be a book in Open Court Publishing
Company’s Popular Culture and Philosophy Series:
http://www.opencourtbooks.com/categories/pcp.htm. Submit ideas for
possible future PCP books to the series editor, George A. Reisch, at
pcpideas@caruspub.com: Thanks for your consideration.
Astro Boy Meets Martin Heidegger
Posted on | April 23, 2012
Joe Steiff and Tristan Tamplin’s Anime and Philosophy: Wide Eyed Wonder gets an appreciative review in Mechademia, a journal devoted to the intersection of scholarly and popular interests in Anime. Despite the proliferation of all things Anime, Ada Palmer finds the collection to be a perfect and unique introduction for the aspiring intellectual fan. My favorite line: “Wikipedia does not link Astro Boy to Heidegger,” she writes. “This volume does.”
Psych and Philosophy CFA is out
Posted on | April 11, 2012
Call for Abstracts
(Psych is a USA Network TV show.)
Psych and Philosophy
Edited by Robert Arp
robertarp320@gmail.com
(1) Submit abstracts of no more than 300 words to: robertarp320@gmail.com
(2) Abstracts due: June 1, 2012
(3) Notification of accepted abstracts: June 15, 2012
(4) First drafts due: September 1, 2012 (flexible)
(5) 10 to 12-paged papers are written in a conversational style for a lay audience (this definitely ain’t no JPhil, Mind, or Nous publication).
Any relevant topic considered, but here are some possibilities:
- Crime scenes and the relationship between deduction, induction, and abduction
- The use of logical fallacies to influence or manipulate beliefs
- Pseudo-science vs. science
- Psychic abilities, hypnosis, and skepticism
- A psychosocial explanation of a psychic’s “abilities”
- The ability to recall numerous facts and what counts as being “smart”
- Shawn’s abilities and Bloom’s taxonomy (remembering, understanding, application, analysis, synthesis, evaluation)
- Photographic memory and other forms of evidence
- Knowledge of the facts vs. getting lucky regarding the facts
- Non-creative vs. creative forms of problem solving
- Solo vs. communal problem solving
- Shawn’s justified true beliefs, or lack thereof
- Shawn’s proofs and disproofs for the existence of god
- Yin, Yang, and dualist themes in Psych
- Straight men, funny men, and the philosophy of humor
- Shawn’s relationship to his father, moral education, and virtue ethics
- Shawn, Gus, and the nature of moral and intellectual friendship
- An analysis of the nature of murder vs. other forms of killing
- Deontological vs. utilitarian themes in Psych
- The moral perspectives of the various characters in Psych
- Rationale for the continued use of psychic detectives by the police
- The continued apparent need for charlatans in our 21st-century societies
- Shawn, Gus, race relations, and Psych
Psych and Philosophy will be a book in Open Court Publishing Company’s Popular Culture and Philosophy Series:
http://www.opencourtbooks.com/
DALEKMANIA in the U.K., Redux
Posted on | March 20, 2012
Move over Sarah Palin. British philosopher Robin Bunce, writing in Doctor Who and Philosophy, has found a new source of abject evil and abhorrence in the universe: The Daleks. Bunce’s theory that the Daleks’ evil strikes us a little too close to home is being discussed from high table to low tabloids and everywhere in between. Here, here, over here, and over here. Other contributors are getting press attention as well, leading to speculation that the Daleks have set their sites on taking over facebook, starting with editor Court Lewis’s page. Philosophy Now, (we’ve been waiting….) has reviewed the book, too.
Boardwalk Empire & Philosophy
Posted on | March 12, 2012
Philosophy and Pop Culture editors extraordinaire, Richard Greene and Rachel Robison, have put on their wingtips and issued a call for papers for Boardwalk Empire and Philosophy. You can find the CFA here: Boardwalk Empire & Philosophy CFA
Rush’s Research Programme
Posted on | February 27, 2012
I’m just perusing Robert Freedman’s Rushvault blog (including a very nice review of some guy’s contribution to Rush and Philosophy) and who should I see but. . . No, not Ayn Rand: Imre Lakatos, the hungarian philosopher of science and one-time bete noire of Thomas (“mob rule!”) Kuhn. On the Ph.D. Dissertation page, Freedman’s vault list several dissertations written on Rush. But I’m still stymied by the nod to Lakatos… unless…. Bingo: Rush is not a paradigm, but a research program. Definitely a progressive one, at that.
Philosophy and the Case of the Real Thing, Again
Posted on | January 17, 2012
The Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies is enthusing about Joe Steiff’s edition of Sherlock Holmes and Philosophy. In fact, the book should be part of the Conan Doyle canon itself. The book
resembles Conan Doyle’s writings in composition, structure, style, form, wit and humor. … The greatest contribution of Josef Steiff’s book is that it brings together philosophy and culture/cultural theories, plus literature/literary theories … to give meanings to 21st century knowledge, life and reality.
The full review is here.
Popmatters.com agrees:
It seems fitting that a book dedicated to Sherlock Holmes should focus on questions, or perhaps a better way of looking at it: many chapters solve their own mini-mysteries.
Catherine Ramsdell gives the book an impressive 7/10. The Times Literary Supplement nods to the book’s explanation of why “the celebrated sleuth is ‘like a good hip-hop song’,” while a reviewer at Amazon.com says the volume contains “far too much useful information to write this book off as merely a Sherlock Holmes companion piece.” Another singles out two essays, one in which Holmes and Watson’s relationship is “masterfully developed . . . in light of Aristotle’s philosophy on friendship” and another which finds “the West’s claim of valuing truth and knowledge stand[ing] in stark contrast to its history of the persecution and murder of heretics.”
Vanity Fairly Correct
Posted on | December 14, 2011
I feel as if the whole culture is stoned, listening to an LP that’s been skipping for decades, playing the same groove over and over. Nobody has the wit or gumption to stand up and lift the stylus.
Kurt Andersen writes in this month’s Vanity Fair what I’ve described here, and here: Popular culture in recent decades has tended to recycle itself and avoid the genuinely new, different, alarming, or exhilarating. Why is this? Andersen thinks it’s “an unconscious collective reaction to all the profound nonstop newness we’re experiencing on the tech and geopolitical and economic fronts. People have a limited capacity to embrace flux and strangeness and dissatisfaction, and right now we’re maxed out.”
But we’re not “maxed out.” Ambitious young artists or writers are killing themselves to cultivate next wave of style or innovation, both to make a name for themselves and to advance the traditions they adore. The problem is that what’s new to them is an album at the Goodwill store from an artist they’ve never heard of, or an obscure film, or a the typeface from an old magazine. They’re surrounded by the commercialism of nostalgia (and here their baby-boomer elders are partly to blame) and unable to pry themselves away from the enchanting, but necessarily unoriginal, cultural buffet of thrift shops, youtube, and archive.org.
How to break out of the nostalgic haze? Who knows? It seems the every institution in America, from risk-averse Hollywood to resume-padding university professors, is more interested in retreading its past than moving on. Andersen has his money on ‘a pendulum swing’ back to values that prize innovation and creativity as they did in the 1940s and late 1960s. But he worries that the malaise may instead be a game changer, something like “that moment when all great cultures—Egyptian, Roman, Mayan, Islamic, French, Ottoman, British—slide irrevocably into an enervated late middle age.”
My hope is that the Occupy Movement will come to the rescue. It just might be that you’d can’t have great popular culture without some kind of resistance and revolt. No The Graduate or Easy Rider without Hey, Hey LBJ, How Many Kids Did You Kill Today? After all, the two circumstances are connected and ripe for mutual inspiration. One reason we are surrounded by nostalgia in music, clothes, and movies is that it sells; and one reason Wall Street had it coming was that it insists on selling anything, including American jobs, natural resources, or bundles of questionable mortgages, that can be sold for a profit. So if the Occupiers inspire a generation of artists and tastemakers and voters to pry themselves away from familiarity and nostalgia, pop culture and American political culture might save themselves, together.
SpongeBob Appointed to Institute for Advance Study
Posted on | November 30, 2011
SpongeBob contemplates the perennial questions
Not really, but the volume of philosophical essays he inspired is getting some good press. The Wisconsin Journal Sentinel loves it, and expects it will be this year’s stocking stuffer.