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    Category: Jon Cogburn

    • A metaphysician and a deconstructionist walk into a bar. . .

      Really nice conversation between Gary Gutting and John Caputo about religious belief at the Stone here. Gutting's interventions are great, with the exception of: "After all the deconstructive talk, the law of noncontradiction still holds." No. No. No. Deconstruction in part shows exactly where it fails (cf. Chapter 14 of Priest's Beyond the Limits of…

    • philosophical analogues of Lodge’s humiliation game

      In "Changing Places" David Lodge describes "the humiliation game," where English professors have to list the most important book they've never read. The winner is the person for whom it is the most humiliating to admit s/he hasnt read the book s/he gives. In the novel, humiliation ends up generating something analagous to a Priest…

    • Even Foucault couldn’t make this up (hat-tip Rod Dreher)

      Why do things like "professional development," "continuing education," "team-building," and (yes, this too) "assessment" always have to tend towards infantalizing the poor people subjected to them? It's one thing to bureaucratically humiliate people by making them waste huge gobs of time. But this business of making them engage in ritualistic idiotic performances (which always involve…

    • Cool dialect test for where all y’all come from (hat tip Rod Dreher)

      Wow, this is cool. Try it out, especially if you've moved away from your childhood home. I got Montgomery, Mobile, and Birmingham as my dialectical homes and Milwaukee, Grand Rapids, and Detroit (sorry Jack, sorry Iggy) as the places most dialectically foreign to me. As a child my father was stationed in Montgomery the most,…

    • Firing the Canon?

      With Robert Brandom (and for recognizably Hegelian reasons) I think that Whig histories are necessary. I also agree with conservative critics that American English departments damaged their own enrollments when the 1980s attacks on the canon led to too sweeping curricular changes. In every field, it's very important for students to master a Whig history…

    • suggestions for books to read for pluralist reading group (hat-tip David Shope)

      This semester we've started a pluralist reading group at LSU. We've got students and faculty from both analytic and continental philosophy who may not have that much antecedent overlap in background and methodology. So (as much as possible) it's very important to get books that will help analytic philosophers learn continental philosophy while simultaneously help…

    • Plato in Playdough

    • Philosophers’ Carnival #160. . .

      is here.* Lot's of cool stuff in nearly every area of philosophy. [*(1) Hat-tip USC's own Kenny Pearce, (2) To host a carnival, go to the philosopher's carnival homepage and fill out the form.]

    • Can someone please explain the publisher’s blurbs for Heidegger’s Black Notebooks

      Google translate gives me gibberish, but with the possible exception (I can't tell) of comments at the end of both blurbs the gibberish seemed to be downplaying the elephant in the dining room. My German is inexcusably (for someone who lived there for two years as a child) awful, so I'd be really interested to…

    • But What about the Children?

      It is not very difficult to give undergraduates advice about where they might pursue graduate study without egregiously insulting large numbers of your professional colleagues.  But then how to explain the ubiquity things like this not unrepresentative post by Spiros?* In the context of a very nice post about an exceptional department, Professor Leiter claims:…