Ted Goldberg was a kid in my fifth grade class, back in 1978. We were class friends and even had a few “playdates” together (I first heard Supertramp’s Breakfast in America at his house), but we were never really close. In high school, we would maintain a friendly...
If you were a kid in the 1970’s and loved superheroes you were lucky, because your childhood coincided with Marvel’s magnificent Bronze Age, with the even better Silver Age only proverbial minutes behind. These are just three of who knows how many comics I bought at...
There’s a (somewhat) old saying, “Opinions are like a**holes. Everybody has one,” and it’s as true now as it was forty years ago. What’s different now is that you have to hear everyone’s opinions; all of the time; whether you want to or not. Perhaps ‘all of the time’...
Brian Leiter recently invited people to suggest “philosophical things that everyone should know.” I answered with ten things, which you can see in the comments on the original post. What philosophical ideas should non-philosophers know about? But then I started...
[1] You are talking with a friend who is a bit too taken with superhero comics. Halfway into an enthusiastic speech regarding the virtues of Captain America, you say to him gently, “You do realize that Captain America doesn’t exist, right?” What effect is this...
It’s no secret that I am a pretty committed gamer, something that has been true since 1979, when I first began playing Dungeons and Dragons. I was in the sixth grade, and the game resonated with me in a way that previously only novels and movies could, but with a...
My interest here is in the way that Standpoint Epistemology (SE hereafter) is deployed in contemporary moral and political discourse. I am not interested in hypothetical, abstract, idealized treatments of the subject. The effort to develop an idealized form of SE...
The Man in the High Castle (1962) The novel is set in an alternative history in which the Axis powers were victorious in the Second World War, and the United States has been divided up between German and Japanese empires, the Germans controlling the East Coast, the...
Philosophers sacralize moral obligation and maintain that moral considerations are always overriding of all others, but ordinary people [as well as philosophers in their ordinary lives] hold actions done from earnest desire in higher esteem than those done from duty....