Independent Scholar and Writer.

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It’s a Big Club, and You Ain’t in It: George Carlin as Social and Political Theorist

February 14, 2016 • by Laura Nelson

I recall many years ago, when he was guest-hosting the Tonight show, George Carlin having a somewhat strained political conversation with the comedian Shelley Winters. It was during the waning of the Nixon years, where confidence in government was beginning its slide down to the Stygian depths where it rests ...

Reviews

Hooray for Schlock: the Coen Brothers’ “Hail Caesar!”

February 11, 2016 • by Laura Nelson

(Caution: mild spoiler alert)

The films of Joel and Ethan Coen are very attentive to mood – plot, characterization, setting, all seem to be geared toward establishing a strong mood that commands and demands our attention more than anything else. Fargo and No Country for Old Men ...

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Hooray for Schlock: the Coen Brothers’ “Hail Caesar!”

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Circular Firing Squads, Elephants in the Room, and Dead Parrots

February 2, 2016 • by Laura Nelson

Usually it is the Democratic Party that is most adept at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. This year is very different. The Republicans have beat the Democrats in setting up a circular firing squad by ceasing to be a political party, or rather by morphing into a party ...

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In Defense of Gravitas

January 25, 2016 • by Laura Nelson

“I raise no objection to television's junk. The best things on television are its junk, and no one and nothing is seriously threatened by it. Besides, we do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant. Therein is our problem, for television ...

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Was Wittgenstein a Realist or an Antirealist?

January 25, 2016 • by Laura Nelson

(A while back, in my post “The Scholar, the Prophet, the Monk, and the Healer”, promised a series of philosophically oriented posts that would explore “whether Rorty, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, or Dewey successfully evaded the dualisms they struggled with, or how well they manage to avoid the extremes of nihilism and ...

Feature

I Can’t Give Everything Away: on David Bowie’s Final Song

January 12, 2016 • by Laura Nelson

I had heard snippets of “Lazarus”, the third song on David Bowie’s new release “Blackstar”, on the radio last week. The announcer described it as part of Bowie’s newest “jazz album”, although the strongest connection I could detect with jazz was the omnipresence of the saxophone as a lead instrument. ...

I Can’t Give Everything Away: on David Bowie’s Final Song

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Mr. Clinton’s Lament

January 11, 2016 • by Laura Nelson

In 2014, when the editorial staff of The New Republic resigned en masse to protest its looming corporatization by a publisher aiming to convert it to “a vertically integrated digital media company,” I was a bit smug in my surprise. Ironic, I thought: the magazine, which lurched from “popular front” ...

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Prisoners of the Prisoner’s Dilemma

December 28, 2015 • by Laura Nelson

Here is the problem. In my humble opinion, Bernie Sanders is clearly the best candidate running for the office of President of the United States of America. His policies are sound, his integrity unimpeachable, his intelligence undeniable. He is also attracting tremendous crowds, and raising significant funds while bypassing (as ...

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The Scholar, the Prophet, the Monk, and the Healer

December 28, 2015 • by Laura Nelson

I think it safe to say that 1971 was a watershed year for philosophy, in that it saw the publication of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice. Prior to the publication of that work, political philosophy was in a kind of self-imposed exile. Still in thrall to the metaethical constraints of ...

Power and Crisis

Against “Charm”

The Uses of Autobiography for Philosophy

December 20, 2015 • by Laura Nelson

Moreover, how other philosophers lived and died is not the most important thing about them either: while life and work are inseparable, the latter takes pride of place. Heidegger went too far in saying that all one needs to know about Aristotle, for philosophical purposes, was that he lived, then ...

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Two Cheers for Prayer Shaming

December 5, 2015 • by Laura Nelson

My mentor at Fordham, the late Quentin Lauer, S.J., who helped introduce Husserl’s phenomenology to an American audience and was a Hegel scholar par excellence, liked to tell a story about his boyhood in Brooklyn, where he would go swimming off the docks adjacent to Upper New York bay with ...

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Shades of Gray

November 28, 2015 • by Laura Nelson

First of all, my apologies for the title: I thought it irresistibly appropriate, but unfortunately and unintentionally reminiscent of that awful series of potboiler novels. . . My aim is to try to broaden this attempt at dialogue initiated by Professors Goldfarb and Zaretsky in their point/counterpoint into a multifaceted conversation ...