I had a half-day off and wasn't meeting up with the Kid until later, so I read the first chapter of my legal philosophy textbook this afternoon. It was a mini-essay on natural law along with a series of selections from Aquinas. Which is such an odd place to start in a lot of ways because it's so based in a whole other political system than our ( Read more... )

I watched “The Menagerie” for the first time ever last night (the two-parter where Captain Pike returns to Talos IV after being horribly maimed), and it struck me how interesting it would be to use it to teach Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Plato’s idea is that humans in their natural state are like prisoners in a dank, dark cave seeing shadows cast ( Read more... )

I'm thinking a bit about a link I saw passed around in some Facebook posts today: Eighty-five Years Ago Today, J.R.R. Tolkien Convinces C.S. Lewis that Christ is the True Myth. To be honest, I've not gotten past the title. The site is a standard of evangelical culture-blogging (including culture war-blogging), and I'm not sure I want to invest my ( Read more... )

For those of you interested in philosophy and my thinky-thoughts on it (which I get may not be everyone, so really, if it's not your thing don't feel obliged), I threw together a post at my non-fannish blog. The start:

A while ago I read Eugene Park’s HuffPo piece and Brian Leiter’s follow-up over at 3 AM asking the question, is philosophy racist ( Read more... )

I finally (finally finally; I know) got around to watching Captain America: Winter Soldier. Really, probably my biggest regret was that I didn't see it sooner - it was fun summertime fare with Captain Dorito and Mr. Angsty Pants McEyeliner, lots of exciting, well-done action sequences, a good deal of heart and some surprisingly complex characters. ( Read more... )

(Fair warning: I initially wrote this up while sick last week. I stand by the basic point, but the writing style is a bit less focused and eloquent than I usually aim for. It seemed still worth sharing so I'm posting it as-is. Hope anyone interested can see the thoughts behind the slightly meandering writing style ( Read more... )

Over at Tumblr, Tiger in the Flightdeck pointed out that there are a lot of things from Sherlock's third series taken directly from fanfic and fan-art. There's a whole genre of Sherlock being a ballet dancer predating the show, and the bit from TSOT where Sherlock stuffs a dozen or so cigarettes in his mouth is almost an exact match for a ( Read more... )

The gang over at Facebook got me talking about the recent "Hobby Lobby" case, and I promised an explanation of why I disagreed with the decision. Not necessarily as a lawyer; I'm not one, though I play one on TV hang around quite a few and try to listen to what they say. Still, this is less about what the law allows and more about how I think ( Read more... )

.... here. Quoting from Lewis's "Three Ways of Writing for Children" and Tolkien's "On Fairy Tales," the author tries to answer Dawkins's concern that fiction, even our best-loved fairy-tales, encourage kids to accept the supernatural. Basically, believing in wizards and hobbits and consulting detectives is supposed to make us believe in other ( Read more... )

Somehow, philosophical humor never fails to make me smile. From the SMBC cartoon:

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