Month: May 2022

  • Childhood with Aba

    by Daniel A. Kaufman ___ It’s been several months, now, since my father – “Aba” – died, and the memory of these last, difficult years has receded just enough for some of the earlier, happier ones to begin to re-emerge.  The last thing I worked with him on was Start-Ups, a book about his life […]

  • The Uses of Diversity

    by Kevin Currie-Knight ____ Imagine that you are in charge of some workplace. You look around and notice that while you are located in an area chock full of diversity of all kinds – racial, religious, and the like – your staff and customers are quite homogenous. Suppose that in your case, you are concerned […]

  • Getting Personal About Race and “Transracial” Families

    by Kevin Currie-Knight ____ Sheena (SUNY Oneanta) and Kevin (East Carolina University) continue an ongoing conversation about the idea of race and Sheena’s arguments about racelessnes. This episode gets more personal about Sheena’s and Kevin’s respective connections to “transracial” families. Sheena was adopted into a “transracial” family and Kevin is adopting a daughter who is […]

  • “Good Practices”

    by Daniel A. Kaufman ____ I am mostly out of the philosophy profession and have been for several years now, so but for Justin Weinberg and his Daily Nous, I would be unaware of the vital goings-on of professional philosophy’s Bright Young Things and their fellow travelers. I would have never have known, for example, […]

  • Toleration

    by Kevin Currie-Knight ____ Suppose that you live next door to someone and think something about the way they live – their religion, their domestic arrangements, their politics, even their race – is wrong or objectionable. If you are a particularly grousy or dogmatic neighbor, you might take every occasion to let them know how […]

  • Philosophy (of Education): What’s the Point?

    by Kevin Currie-Knight ____ The following piece is a reflection I wrote mainly in response to undergraduate questions about philosophy’s purpose and value. I teach philosophy-of-education themed (and other) classes in a College of Education, so most of my students are neither philosophy majors nor in any way fluent with philosophy coming into my course. […]

  • Dreams and Peculiar Waking Experiences

    by Mark English ___ Sorting through some personal papers recently, I came across some scribbled notes about dreams and hallucinations. I have never considered dreams – my own or anyone else’s – worth recording or trying to analyze in any serious way, but have always maintained an interest in the various manifestations of consciousness and […]

  • A Foolish Impartiality is the Hobgoblin of Morality

    by Daniel A. Kaufman ____ Philosophy professors like to think that ours is a clarifying business, so some may be surprised to discover that we can be confused about things that most ordinary people are not. One of these things is partiality and impartiality and how they affect ethical questions. Certainly, the average person thinks […]

  • Standards

    by Daniel A. Kaufman ____ Both religion and philosophy endeavor to provide us with objective standards for our moral and aesthetic and other judgments, as well as our actions. Religion does it by stipulating a supreme authority in the person of God, while philosophy does it by appeal to reason and rationality, the authority of […]