Jacques Lacan in the Mirror: the Real v. the Imaginary and Symbolic 27 Aug 2013 | 08:36 pm

The Real as illustrated in courtly love. In his essay, “Courtly Love, or, Woman as Thing” (1994) cultural critic Slavoj Zizek (b. 1949) presents courtly love—knight-Lady romance as ritualized in the E...

A Checklist for Critical Thinking 25 Aug 2013 | 08:08 pm

A lot of us are brought under the spell of false beliefs because we can tell a good story about how they might be true, they are consistent with logic (they are logically possible), and we want to be ...

David Chalmers on Consciousness 25 Aug 2013 | 05:54 am

Hegel for Beginners 23 Aug 2013 | 06:14 pm

Outer v. inner direction. The philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) had a decisive influence on Karl Marx, and he continues to exert influence on intellectual thought today. For this r...

The Zen of Woody Allen 22 Aug 2013 | 11:57 am

From a recent interview: It’s just an accident that we happen to be on earth, enjoying our silly little moments, distracting ourselves as often as possible so we don’t have to really face up to the f...

A Pretty Awesome Disruption of Business as Usual 22 Aug 2013 | 11:39 am

Speaking truth to power and standing up for the stigmatized and persecuted.

Thomas Jefferson’s Weltanschauung Meets a New Claim: Premise Checking as a Tool for Thinking 21 Aug 2013 | 07:13 pm

A Cautionary Tale. As a Southerner living in Virginia in the 18th century, Thomas Jefferson once encountered a jaw-dropping claim, and it came from two eyewitnesses. They said they had seen rocks fall...

What Would Homer Say? Model Writers at Your Shoulder as a Tool for Writing Improvement 20 Aug 2013 | 10:04 pm

Imitation and emulation. The ancient Greek teacher Longinus is among the first persons to address what would become a recurrent theme in the history of rhetoric and literary criticism: the sublime (el...

Read 20 Aug 2013 | 11:37 am

At The Daily Beast, academics and writers were asked to name “one book that [college] students shouldn’t escape campus without having read.” MIT professor and Pulitzer Prize winner, Junot Diaz, picked...

Hot Potato 19 Aug 2013 | 10:43 am

The dookie left the doggie; the doggie left the dookie. For me. Going where you’re going. Where are you going?