This weekend (Dec 7-8) I am attending the Personhood Beyond the Human conference at Yale University. Here is a description of the conference’s agenda: The event will focus on personhood for nonhuman animals, including great apes, cetaceans, and elephants, and will explore the evolving notions of personhood by analyzing them through the frameworks of neuroscience,Continue reading “The Personhood Beyond the Human Conference”
Category Archives: Philosophy
RIP Nelson Mandela
I must have been an extraordinarily ignorant teenager because the first time I heard of Nelson Mandela came only when I saw The Specials perform ‘Free Nelson Mandela‘ on the BBC’s Top of the Pops. Who was Nelson Mandela, and why was it imperative that he be freed? What had this man done to getContinue reading “RIP Nelson Mandela”
Tim Kreider and the Problem of Too Many Writers
Tim Kreider has a very familiar sounding complaint in the New York Times. It is familiar because his article follows a well-worn template of talking about the Brave New Bad World of Free Content, and because the Times routinely publishes such Op-Eds. Like most screeds put out by what I have termed ‘the whining artist‘Continue reading “Tim Kreider and the Problem of Too Many Writers”
Nicholas Carr on Automation’s Perils
Nicholas Carr offers us some interesting and thoughtful worries about automation in The Atlantic (‘All Can Be Lost: The Risk of Putting Our Knowledge in the Hands of Machines,’ 23 October 2013). These worries center largely around de-skilling: as automation grows ever more sophisticated–and evidence suggests it is pushing into domains once thought to be inaccessible–humansContinue reading “Nicholas Carr on Automation’s Perils”
‘The Road’ and the Centrality of Love for Existence
How can a difficult read be an easy one? It can be easy because the difficulty is compelling and seductive, because ‘difficult’ does not mean ‘obscure’, because difficult can be worthy of admiration. A few days ago, when I saw John Hillcoat‘s The Road, based on Cormac McCarthy‘s novel of the same name, I had not yetContinue reading “‘The Road’ and the Centrality of Love for Existence”
The Post-Apocalyptic Zone of Moral Instruction
During a Facebook discussion in response to my post yesterday on The Road, my friend Maureen Eckert wrote: I am never sure what to make of “post-apocalyptic porn.” On the one hand they seem to be thought experiments about the “State of Nature.” On the other, they seem to tend to express exaggerated exasperation withContinue reading “The Post-Apocalyptic Zone of Moral Instruction”
John Hillcoat’s ‘The Road’: Bleak and Unsparing
John Hillcoat’s The Road is a faithful cinematic adaptation of Cormac McCarthy‘s bleak vision of a post-apocalyptic world. It is almost unrelentingly grim because it is unsparing about the bitter truths of a world in which food and morality are both in short supply: existence is a mere step up from the eventual slow deathContinue reading “John Hillcoat’s ‘The Road’: Bleak and Unsparing”
‘Empire,’ ‘Self-Government,’ and ‘Religious Conflict’
In The Colors of Violence, an attempt to contribute ‘a depth-psychological dimension to the understanding of religious conflict, especially the tensions between Hindus and Muslims [in India]’, Sudhir Kakar writes¹: If Hindu-Muslim relations were in better shape in the past, with much less overt violence, it was perhaps also because of the kind of polityContinue reading “‘Empire,’ ‘Self-Government,’ and ‘Religious Conflict’”
Online Conversational Spaces: The Vocal and the Previously Silenced
Comments on Internet discussion forums have been the subject of much analysis ever since electronic conversational spaces first made their appearance back in the 1970s. Pioneering scholars of ‘computerized conferencing systems’ like Murray Turoff and Starr Roxanne Hiltz–who conducted most of their empirical studies on the Electronic Information Exchange System–noted that several features of theseContinue reading “Online Conversational Spaces: The Vocal and the Previously Silenced”
RIP Norman Geras
Norman Geras, prolific blogger and professor emeritus of politics at the University of Manchester has passed away at the age of 70. He had been suffering from prostate cancer. Norm was best known as a political theorist whose oeuvre included books on Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg and Richard Rorty. (He also served on the editorial boards ofContinue reading “RIP Norman Geras”
Samir Chopra 