Okay, wait a minute. You think you’re stacking gifts under the tree, but are you really? How do you know? Maybe you’re not the stacker but the stackee. Not the giver but the given. And about that tree: maybe it doesn’t really look like a tree. Or maybe it isn’t there. Maybe you’re not there….
Here we are again, in a bardo state. (Note: “Bardo,” as all you Tibetan Buddhists know – and among our readers, you are legion – refers to an intermediate state, as between one life and the next. I’ll use it to mean any state between a current important thing and the important thing one is…
I caught the movie musical version of Les Miserables recently (and I will thank my brain to stop playing snippets of the soundtrack over and over and over again) and was struck by a line sung by the hero, Jean Valjean, late in the story: “To love another person is to see the face of…
Young and mostly silent Jake, the enigmatic hero of the television program Touch, doesn’t look ancient. Nor does he look particularly Greek. But ah – might he be a reincarnation of Pythagoras? Or at least a fictional character inspired by Pythagoras? Who? Okay, for you hordes of non-philosophy majors pit there: Pythagoras was probably the…
You don’t exist. So I can advise or even scold you without worrying that something I say will, down the line, cause you to hide behind a therapist’s couch and whimper. (Yeah, I know that the Bhagavad Gita tells us that we have no control over the outcome of our actions. Stop showing off!) You…
Being a Philosopher, I see Philosophy everywhere and talk about it all the time. But sometimes I am surprised by where I find it and in what abundance. And rarely do I find in one body of work ideals that cover Aristotle’s thoughts on friendship and justice (Nicomachean Ethics), Confucius’ ideas of Right Association (Great…
For parts 1 and 2 of this article, go here and here. Watchmen and Philosophy: A Rorschach Test , edited by Mark D. White from CUNY’s College of Staten Island and a veteran of Wiley’s (Blackwell’s) Philosophy and Pop Culture series, is a volume with results as mixed as the characters in its subject matter,…
Editor’s note: With the imminent release of Watchmen, we thought we’d try and get a different perspective. So we asked Alexandra Honigsberg, a professional ethicist and genre author, to read the book for the first time and delve into the ethos of the world created by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. If super-hero comics are…
