This past weekend’s viewing pleasures included a long-standing, and much-awaited, resident of my movie queue: Nina Paley‘s 2008 graphically and musically eclectic reworking of the Indian epic Ramayana, Sita Sings The Blues. The movie incorporates four elements: a reworking of the traditional narrative of the Ramayana; a Mystery Science Theater-like commentary on the Ramayana carriedContinue reading “Nina Paley’s “Sita Sings The Blues””
Category Archives: Philosophy
FOSS Licenses: Hackers As Legal Maestros
Over at Concurring Opinions, Biella Coleman writes a very good post on her anthropological work on hackers. In it Biella states what many of us who have looked at the world of free and open source software think: [M]any developers are nimble legal thinkers, which helps explain how they have built, in a relatively shortContinue reading “FOSS Licenses: Hackers As Legal Maestros”
Jaron Lanier and the Web’s “False Ideals”
Jaron Lanier’s Op-Ed in the New York Times today is a classic piece of muddled Lanier writing that allows him to train his sights, yet again, on his favorite bugaboo and strawman: ‘free content.’ And in persisting with this notion of the demand for ‘free content’ being the true threat to the ‘Net, Lanier showsContinue reading “Jaron Lanier and the Web’s “False Ideals””
Fiction, Non-Fiction, Essays, Posterity
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post disagreeing with Katha Pollitt’s claim that (roughly), Even the best non-fiction writers only get read by future generations if they are lucky enough to have written some quality best-selling fiction. Pollitt had referred to “columnists and essayists and book reviewers” in her original post, but inContinue reading “Fiction, Non-Fiction, Essays, Posterity”
John Wycliffe And Academic Freedom
I’m an academic; quite understandably, one of my concerns is often academic freedom. Mine, and that of my colleagues. My employer, the City University of New York, has had a mixed relationship with academic freedom over the years (this ambivalent attitude was perhaps best on display during the Tony Kushner flap last year). But myContinue reading “John Wycliffe And Academic Freedom”
Megan McArdle’s Defense Of Property Rights
In the Atlantic, Megan McArdle offers a long, tilting-at-strawmen defense of (intellectual) property rights. (In what follows, I’m not going to attempt line-by-line rebuttals; McArdle rambled too much for that. I’ve simply directed my ire against the two aspects of the post that stood out the most: the attack on a strawman argument and theContinue reading “Megan McArdle’s Defense Of Property Rights”
Personal Identity And Wanting To Be Jim Lovell
Personal identity is a philosophical topic made for thought experiments. The problem of persistence of identity is quite simply posed; as the Stanford Encylopedia for Philosophy entry for personal identity puts it: What determines which past or future being is you? Suppose you point to a child in an old class photograph and say, “That’sContinue reading “Personal Identity And Wanting To Be Jim Lovell”
Things You Could Find On A Professor’s Office Door: Cavafy’s City
Professors put the darndest things on their office doors: I’ll-be-back-in-five-minutes notices, announcements of conferences, descriptions of new classes, suitably anonymized student grades, political posters, stickers. And then it gets wierd: vacation photos, children’s drawings, cartoons (a perennial faculty favorite in New York appears to be New Yorker cartoons), and of course, jokes culled from theContinue reading “Things You Could Find On A Professor’s Office Door: Cavafy’s City”
Ross Douthat, Sophistry, and Getting Philip Larkin Wrong
Folks familiar with Ross Douthat’s writing over at the New York Times should be well clued-on to his style, which produces bits of meandering sophistry that include a sentence or two toward the end giving away the game. In those sentences, Douthat reveals the tension of maintaining the appearance of a sophisticated intellectual conservative isContinue reading “Ross Douthat, Sophistry, and Getting Philip Larkin Wrong”
Teaching Philosophy By Reading Out Loud
This semester, while teaching my two classes (Freud and Psychoanalysis; Modern Philosophy), I’ve relied at times on reading out loud my assigned texts in class. In particular, I’ve read out, often at great length, Leibniz’s Discourses on Metaphysics and The Mondadology, portions from The Critique of Pure Reason, and in the Freud class, portions ofContinue reading “Teaching Philosophy By Reading Out Loud”
Samir Chopra 