CALL ME MAGGIE

  • Debtfare: the Commodification of Student Debt

    Debtfare: the Commodification of Student Debt

    Despite the uneasy relationship between the profitable student loan industry and growing student debt defaults, students continue to borrow to pay for college, and educational loans are the only form of consumer debt to increase markedly since 2008. The industry has grown steadily over the past several decades in lockstep…

  • asking pardon of the spirit of the tree

    Originally posted on coromandal: Imagine asking pardon of the spirit of the tree before cutting a branch, of the mountain before extracting stone for aggregate, of the lake before fishing, the stream before removing water, the sky taking a bird, the earth mining minerals. Processes would slow down, awareness of the nature of…

  • Recognizing Human Dignity

    It is risky to predict the outcome of Supreme Court cases based on what the justices say at the oral argument. But Kennedy’s commitment to the principle of human dignity and his understanding of its role in protecting intimate relationships run deep. If Bonauto and her colleagues succeed in winning…

  • Decision

    If I am no longer the man I was, it is because I decide to become the man I will be.

  • Karl Jaspers as Interdisciplinarian

    Karl Jaspers as Interdisciplinarian

    A very solid piece on the interdisciplinary nature of Jaspers’ psychopathology as well as the connection of his first great work on the embodied mind to his later existential and historical works. As the managing editor of the Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity (2nd Ed., forthcoming 2016), I often have had…

  • Occupying Space

    Occupying Space

    A man should be so poor that he is not and has not a place for God to act in. To reserve a place would be to maintain distinctions. Meister Eckhart quoted in Merton, Thomas. Zen and the Birds of Appetite. A New Directions Book, 1968, 26. iBooks. I am…

  • Fate and the Wire

    Fate and the Wire

    Tautological understanding is very much a part of The Wire‘s metaphysics. David Simon directs/authors the series structurally along the lines of Greek Tragedy rather than the Shakesperean variety. Essential paths–following the strict law of identity–play a huge role in instantiating a certain fatefulness as decisions by the Greater Powers–City Hall, the…

  • Bibliometrics: The Leiden Manifesto

    Data are increasingly used to govern science. Research evaluations that were once bespoke and performed by peers are now routine and reliant on metrics1. The problem is that evaluation is now led by the data rather than by judgement. Metrics have proliferated: usually well intentioned, not always well informed, often…

  • How Legalizing Psychedelics Creates a Healthy Competition with Organized Religion

    How Legalizing Psychedelics Creates a Healthy Competition with Organized Religion

    Organized religion is almost always a monopoly. Legalization of mind opening substances would lead to a free market of ideas that dogmatic superstructures cannot survive. In a culture that prides itself on a bizarro academic sense of rationality, there is zero rationality in the popular way we view spirituality period.…

  • Charting more diffuse influences across time

    My colleagues Adam Briggle, Robert Frodeman and Britt Holbrook continue their work on the philosophy of impact and the impact of philosophy… Today even the humanities are expected to have an impact. In the 2014 REF, for instance, philosophy formed one of 36 ‘units of assessment’. In a previous post…

  • NYU as a Model for Predatory Higher Education

    The Art of the Gouge… describes how NYU engages in a mind-numbing range of tricks and traps to extract as much in fees as possible from students, while at the same time failing to invest in and often degrading the educational “product” Source: www.truth-out.org

  • Capitalism Could Kill All Life on Earth

    Are we going to let capitalism destroy life on Earth? According to 99 percent of climate scientists – we’ll know by the end of the century. Source: www.truth-out.org

  • Knowledge Advances By a Series of Funerals

    The boundaries between true intellectual disciplines are currently enforced by little more than university budgets and architecture… The real distinction we should care about — the observation of which is the sine qua non of the scientific attitude — is between demanding good reasons for what one believes and being…

  • Remember This: Capitalism IS Race

    Remember This: Capitalism IS Race

    … It’s not just a race. Consider the radical beginning of Memorial Day in the now forgotten Decoration Day, a holiday that originally recalled the violent partisan political struggles of emancipation as a central aspect of remembrance. At least until… 1877, [when] the Northern capitalist establishment decisively turned their backs on…

  • Ex Machina and Wittgenstein’s Questions

  • Jerome Bruner, “Creative Wholeness” and How We Limit Our Happiness

    If one is to contain the panicking spread of anxiety, one must be able to identify and put a comprehensible label upon one’s feelings better to treat them again, better to learn from experience… Myth, perhaps, serves in place of or as a filter for experiences… …What is the art…

  • Soundthropology: Eno and Graeber in Dialog

    Soundthropology: Eno and Graeber in Dialog

    The 2014 Artangel Longplayer Conversation between Brian Eno and David Graeber took place 7pm, Tuesday 7 October 2014 at the Royal Geographical Society http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuBpOXGLn_o

  • Primacy of Ethics over Metaphysics

    Primacy of Ethics over Metaphysics

    From a consideration of the primacy of ethics in Dante’s The Banquet by Etienne Gilson in Dante the Philosopher (1948): …the Crystaline heaven, or Primum Mobile, ordains by its motion the daily revolution of all the other heavens, a revolution that enables them to receive and transmit to the earth each day the efficacy of all their…