November 2015 – Huenemanniac

November 25, 2015

A philosophical interpretation of recent campus protests

For many of us college folk separated by thousands of miles from the east coast, the recent protests at Yale and Princeton initially seem both frivolous and ridiculous: here is a bunch of students and faculty at fancy schools getting all worked up over “trigger warnings” and Halloween costumes. First-world problems on steroids! How nice… Continue reading

Items of the academy / learning, Meanings of life / death / social & moral stuff

November 23, 2015

Hypatia of Alexandria: or, a primer on platonic love

Plato, as we know, told tales of an abstract realm beyond the senses, a realm beyond the dim and dark cave we call “the world.” It was a realm of forms, first glimpsed through the discipline of mathematics, and more thoroughly known through philosophical cross-examination, or dialectic. It’s not clear just how much religion there… Continue reading

3QD essays, Historical episodes

November 11, 2015

Does philosophy belong in the humanities?

In the old model of the liberal arts, the trivium was the ground floor of the “core curriculum” for students. It consisted in logic, rhetoric, and grammar, or the basic tools for scholarly reading, understanding, and writing. One then studied the quadrivium, or the four fundamental tools for researching nature’s design: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and… Continue reading

Books, Items of the academy / learning

November 1, 2015

More on meaninglessness

I’m glad that my “everything is meaningless” essay generated so much discussion over at 3QD. But the discussion has made it clear to me that I could have been much more explicit in what I was trying to say. First off, let’s agree that there are many different meanings of “meaningfulness.” I was focusing on… Continue reading

Meanings of life / death / social & moral stuff