In Plato’s Protagoras Alcibiades plays the role of Hermes, the ‘ambassador god’, who helps lead Socrates’ conversation with Protagoras through a crisis of dialogue that threatens to destroy the community of education established by the dialogue itself.

By tracing the moments when Alcibiades intervenes in the conversation, we are led to an unde…[Read more]

Digital media technology, when deployed in ways that cultivate shared learning communities in which students and teachers are empowered to participate as partners in conjoint educational practices, can transform the way we teach and learn philosophy. This essay offers a model for how to put blogging and podcasting in the service of a cooperative…[Read more]

This article traces what Schürmann calls the “double comprehension of being” in Kant in which the sense of being as pure givenness is said to be recognized but denied by Kant as his thinking undertakes its Copernican turn. Schürmann insists that this can be heard in the ambiguous ways the German terms “Position” and “Setzung” are used in Kant.…[Read more]

Yesterday, the #humetrics team spent the better part of our day articulating values, outputs, processes, and metrics that humanistic research results in. Our idea was that if we could “reverse engineer” metrics from values and practices, that we could come up with metrics that are more humane: they not only reflect and incentivize the pra…[Read more]

As part of the TriangleSCI HuMetrics working group, I spent the better part of this afternoon brainstorming and debating academic values, products, processes, and metrics in an attempt to lay a foundation for this week’s attempt at articulating “humane metrics” for the humanities.

As our discussion winded down, it occurred to the team that…[Read more]

As humanities scholars increasingly recognize the value of public engagement, and as the proportion of tenure-track faculty positions available continues to decline, many humanities programs are focusing renewed attention on equipping graduate students for careers as scholars both within and beyond academe. To support those efforts, the Scholarly…[Read more]