24 posts
A recap of the ground covered in the Feminist Romp Through the History of Philosophy — from Plato and Aristotle through Descartes, Hegel, Merleau-Ponty, and Beauvoir — plus an invitation to join the Fall cohort.
How can I understand you, what you are feeling and thinking? Why you do the things you do? You are that part of my experience that is not me, and you have the power to affect our shared world. Even...
A deliberate and strategic effort to redefine and attack empathy has been underway for nearly twenty years. What might initially appear to be isolated critiques of empathy, upon closer examination...
--- Let's play the associations game. I say technology, you say? AI, robots, smart phones, computers? In another era, it might have been a factory, the steam engine, railroads, coal energy. Even...
--- This piece examines how Paul Bloom, in his book Against Empathy, uses a rhetorical strategy called dissociation to cut a distinction between cognitive and emotional empathy, to disparage...
--- Prior in this Empathy series: --- Today, I’d like to begin to tell you the story of how those on the religious right (Christian, Evangelical, Nationalists) have mounted the war on empathy over...
I first encountered Donna Haraway's “A Cyborg Manifesto” in a feminist epistemologies seminar in the early 1990s. At that time, we felt that we were on the cusp of something new, and her writing...
“Across nations and cultures, entire words and ideas are missing or deprived of the weight they deserve. The presence of absence is just as powerful as the spread of misinformation or false news....
Thank you for those of you who made it to this Philosophy Publics Unplugged live. Join me for the next live on Wednesdays at 12noon EST. In this episode, we delve into the concept of intuition and...
Thank you , , and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. --- Transcript: Hello everyone. Welcome, welcome. This is our first live. I am Mona Mona. I...
In What Are Friends For? (1993), Marilyn Friedman offers an analysis of friendship in its moral, epistemological, and political dimensions. Her work is clear and analytic, and particularly useful for...
If I were to ask you, do you know how to read? You would probably say, “Oh, yes, of course, I’ve been reading since grade school. I’m a very confident reader!” But the thing is, if it is philosophy...
Philosophy is preparation for death, so said Socrates, the Greek philosopher par excellence, a martyr to the cause, executed by the state in BC for corrupting the youth. According to his pupil Plato,...
In this old thinkPhilosophy podcast from 2018, I explore Jean-Paul Sartre's essay “Existentialism is a Humanism,” a key introduction to existentialist philosophy. Sartre argues that existentialism’s...
Adams, Carol J. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. Continuum, 1990. Adams explores the intersections of feminism, vegetarianism, and animal rights, arguing that...
1. Rags To Reason "Rags to Reason" delves into existential themes, the interplay of art and ethics, and the relevance of classical philosophers like Aristotle and Sartre in modern contexts. The...
Once we get to Modern Philosophy, concepts of space become more familiar and consequently feel more “real.” It is difficult for us to relate to space as a whirling receptacle steered by Goddesses; or...
If you want to understand how change is possible in the simplest sense of movement from one place to another, you need an account of the space across which that thing moves. This is Aristotle’s...
In her classic “Hairy Cobblers and Philosopher Queens,” Elizabeth Spellman shows us how Plato argues for the education of women alongside men, and for the inclusion of women in all social classes...
Up to this point in this series, we have examined the first figuration of space as a receptacle of being that is (1) analogous to women’s bodies in reproduction, and (2) akin to Necessity in its...
The Story of Space: Presocratic Roots This essay is the first in a series on the history of concepts of space in Western Philosophy. Here we discuss the mythical and ontological precursors to Plato’s...
Pushing Off Of Aristotle Heidegger criticizes Aristotle’s study of beings in the Physics and Metaphysics because it assumes things/objects as the primary focus. Humans (subjects, more precisely)...
Hans Hofmann, artist and philosopher, developed and wrote about how to create volume and depth on a two dimensional plane through the push and pull between colors and forms. Hofmann theorizes the...
Part One: The Desire for Community As is true of many of the stories that we tell ourselves, the narrative creates the reality in which that story makes sense and becomes truth. For example, my...