The emergence of new platforms for public communication, public deliberation, and public action presents new possibilities for forming, organizing, and mobilizing public bodies, which invite philosophical reflection concerning the standards we currently look to for coordinating public movements and for evaluating their effects. Developing a broad…[Read more]

Although Aristotle is often thought to give canonical voice to the priority of vision as the most noble of the human powers of perceiving, this article demonstrates that in Aristotle, touch has a priority vision lacks. By tracing the things Aristotle says about touch in the De Anima and specifically the manner in which he identifies touch as a…[Read more]

Following the scent of wolves and dogs in Plato’s Republic, this essay attempts to track a path that leads us to one of the central teachings of the text itself: that the philosophical life is situated precariously between the tyrannical tendencies of the wolf and the blind obedience of the well-trained dog.

Syllabus for AL491: Culture: Digital and Physical, taught at Michigan State University, as part of the Technology, Humanities, and the Arts in London study abroad program in summer 2016. This course focuses on how material objects and digital representations shape our understanding of culture and history. The course has no prerequisites and counts…[Read more]

Syllabus for 2016 edition of AL285: Introduction to Digital Humanities, taught at Michigan State University as a required course in the Digital Humanities minor. The course is a survey introduction to the field and has no prerequisites. Eleven students were in the course. Examples of final student projects are available at…[Read more]

Syllabus for 2015 edition of AL285: Introduction to Digital Humanities, taught at Michigan State University as a required course in the Digital Humanities minor. The course is a survey introduction to the field and has no prerequisites. Twelve students were in the course. Examples of final student projects are available at…[Read more]

Drawing on the poetry of Wallace Stevens and the remarkable series of lectures Frederick J. E. Woodbridge gave at Union College in 1930 entitled, simply, “The Philosophy of Aristotle,” but published under the title Aristotle’s Vision of Nature, this paper identifies the path of Aristotle’s thinking, its method, as a “peripatetic legomenol…[Read more]

This essay articulates the differences and suggests the similarities between the practices of Socratic political speaking and those of Platonic political writing. The essay delineates Socratic speaking and Platonic writing as both erotically oriented toward ideals capable of transforming the lives of individuals and their relationships with one…[Read more]