Library and information center services are at risk during times of extensive budget reductions. Publicly funded institutions labeled as inessential or as auxiliary departments may lose the revenue necessary to maintain full staffing. Financial circumstances of recent years highlight the importance of strategic planning in library and information…[Read more]

A traditional expectation for publicly funded libraries is that they should be institutions where patron records are kept confidential and a standard of privacy is maintained. After the events of 911, methods increasing search and surveillance powers and reducing legal protections were drafted into law as the “Patriot Act”. Searching patron rec…[Read more]

In response to a lack of funding during the 2007–2009 recession, many library systems reduced or eliminated professional and library support positions. Traditional outcome measurements were not sufficient to convince tax-depleted legislatures to allocate more funds to libraries. In response to the crisis authors recommended cost-saving measures a…[Read more]

Enrique Dussel is considered one of the founding philosophers of liberation in the Latin American tradition, an influential arm of what is now called decoloniality. While he is astoundingly prolific, relatively few of his works can be found in English translation — and none of these focus specifically on education. Founding members of the Latin A…[Read more]

In “Real Patterns” Daniel Dennett developed an argument about the reality of beliefs on the basis of an analogy with patterns and noise. Here I develop Dennett’s analogy into an argument for descriptivism, the view that belief reports do no specify belief contents but merely describe what someone believes, and show that this view is also supported…[Read more]

India has been the seat of deep philosophical engagements since the Vedic period. However, Indian philosophical wisdom, albeit different from Western philosophical in many respects, was not widely known to the rest of the world before colonial thinkers started their dialogue with Indian philosophy through their translations and academic exegeses.…[Read more]

This is a recording of a reading of Aristotle’s De Anima by Richard Lee and Christopher P. Long that was originally presented at the Collegium Phaenomenologicum in Citta di Castello, Umbria, Italy, on July 10, 2018. The theme of the 2018 Collegium was Aristotle: Physis, Psyche, Anthropos, and Kristi Sweet read Chris Long’s part at the conference…[Read more]

In addition to the enigmatic The Codomas, Henri Matisse distinguished three other images with a name, Icarus, Monsieur Loyal and Pierrot’s Funeral for his landmark livre d’artiste Jazz. While the characters Loyal, Pierrot and Icarus were readily identifiable and the images could be interpreted within the context of the difficulties of the Ger…[Read more]

Henri Matisse’s images in Jazz, created during the disruption of the German Occupation of France, were embedded with symbols of cultural resistance, while his text, which he composed after the defeat of the Germans, reflected the transition to a post-Liberation France. The wartime symbols and allusions camouflaged within these images are readily r…[Read more]

Borges made a habit of differing from himself. “El otro” and “Borges y yo” are only the most overt examples from a corpus that constantly played with his biography, his beliefs, and his proper name. In his “non-fiction,” this Auseinselbstsetzung takes the form of self-contradiction, asserting opposed theses in his own name, celebrating…[Read more]

By way of the autobiographical writings of Bruno Schulz and the “resurrection” paintings of Stanley Spencer, this talk sketches out some of the ways in which literature and the fine arts situate themselves within the division, or series of breaks, that Michel de Certeau argued Western historiography inscribes between past and present, between the…[Read more]

This essay ruminates the ethics of a co-implicated, bounded dependence between objects (human and otherwise) that are always in some sense withdrawing from each other but also always together in a some-place labeled “here”: the world (where no Absolute or Outside vantage point is possible or habitable). This essay also considers the possibility,…[Read more]

Through a comparative analysis of Chaucer’s “The Clerk’s Tale” and Lars von Trier’s film “Breaking the Waves,” this essay wonders what happens when two texts and one reader happen to each other and open up a singular adventure that is also a moment of ‘futurition’ that opens up new horizons of meaning, both human and inhuman. How can we reckon the…[Read more]

Few of Arendt’s writings have drawn more criticism from her own supporters than “Reflections on LIttle Rock,” in which she opposes the federally mandated desegregation of schools. I take Arendt’s comments as a way of opening up problems in her conception of the relationship among political storytelling, plurality and judgment. I do this through a…[Read more]

This is a worksheet I ask students to use to engage in self-assessment of their own essays. I use a version of the same worksheet for peer feedback on essays.

From Charles Taylor to Marcel Gauchet, theorists of the social imaginary have given us new ways
to talk about the shared structures of meanings and practices of the West. Theorists of this group
have argued against the narrow horizons of meaning that are deployed by deliberative political
theories in developing their basic normative concepts…[Read more]

When speaking of the philosophical importance of James’s late style, critics and philosophers have taken two broad approaches. One route, exemplified by Martha Nussbaum, attributes this style to the sensitivity of the characters. The other, exemplified by Robert Pippin, attributes the writing’s complexity to the ambiguities of the moral codes dur…[Read more]

Introduction to Althusser’s concept of ideological reproduction, written for those with little to no theory experience.

Slides for an Introduction to Philosophy course at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. These are about Michael Walzer’s article, “Just War and Terrorism” (2006).

Slides for an Introduction to Philosophy course at the University of British Columbia. These refer to an article by Soran Reader, “Making Pacifism Plausible” (2000).