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Todd's Hammer (10 unread)

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  Dewey and Artistic Expression

  Posted: November 29th, 2008, 10:03am EST by Todd

  Tags:    [edit]

  A reader emailed to ask me about the connection of Dewey’s Art as Experience and “expression theory” for her undergraduate aesthetic class. She is especially concerned with the connection of emotion (of the artist, I think) with Dewey’s emphasis on meaning. My own work with Dewey’s philosophy focuses on his social theory and his cognitive [...]
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  Mumbai

  Posted: November 29th, 2008, 8:42am EST by Todd

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  Note: I am no expert in Indian history or politics, so this is just a casual reaction from an outside observer. I would love to hear from readers who are better informed or have deeper analyses to offer. There is a lot of really good commentary floating around the interwebs about the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, [...]
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  Is Marriage the Containment, Once and for All, of Homosexuality?

  Posted: November 14th, 2008, 11:44am EST by Todd

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  A common thread in queer critiques of gay rights movements is that the aims of the movement are moving us toward a domestication or containment of our queerness, of the things that make us different and interesting in the first place. I have mixed feelings about these criticisms.  On one hand, Michael Warner’s argument in The [...]
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  Time for the Movement to Spread Its Protests Around

  Posted: November 13th, 2008, 5:36pm EST by Todd

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  Just a quick thought: Although I’m supportive of the many protests of the Mormon church over the past week, and I think they are totally justified given the church’s prominent role in the Yes on 8 campaign, I think it’s time to expand our scope. We need to continue the peaceful, but pointed protesting, at [...]
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  Free Speech 101: Mormon Edition

  Posted: November 9th, 2008, 8:17pm EST by Todd

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  Please read Chanson’s great post at Mainstreet Plaza explaining to Mormons why protesting at their temples does not violate their rights. My favorite paragraph: But seriously folks, free expression 101: your right of free speech doesn’t guarantee you protection from having other people tell you that what you freely said was wrong. You know it, and [...]
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  Clarification on Mormons and Prop 8

  Posted: November 9th, 2008, 7:57pm EST by Todd

  Tags:    [edit]

  Just to clarify: I’m completely supportive and in favor of the ongoing protests and civil disobedience to bring to light the wrong-headed, unscientific beliefs in fairy tales, and the undemocratic efforts of the Mormon church and its adherents to enshrine their *religious* beliefs regarding homosexuality and marriage into the *secular* Constitution of California. In fact, [...]
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  Going After the Mormon Church’s Tax Exempt Status Is the Wrong Strategy

  Posted: November 8th, 2008, 11:06am EST by Todd

  Tags:    [edit]

  I’ve been getting a lot of people directing me to the Mormons Stole Our Rights web site, starting a campaign to take away the LDS Church’s tax-exempt status for the participation in the Proposition 8 battle. This is the wrong approach. Let me explain: I’m especially pissed at the Mormons for two reasons: 1) it was [...]
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  Morality and the Brain

  Posted: August 4th, 2008, 11:06am EDT by Todd

  Tags:    [edit]

  Some new research into our innate moral capacity (the ability to think morally is innate, not the rules; although there are some foundational presumptions human brains tend to make, relating to reciprocal altruism, but that’s not what I’m posting about here). In western philosophy, there are basically two kinds of moral arguments, deontological and [...]
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  The Happiness Hypothesis

  Posted: July 22nd, 2008, 10:21am EDT by Todd

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  As I’ve mentioned several times recently, I’m slowly working my way through Jonathan Haidt’s The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding MOdern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. Haidt is a “positive psychologist”, a new subfield of psychology that arose in the late 1990s following a couple decades of sort of groundbreaking research in psychology. The subtitle is a little [...]
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  75th Anniversary of “A Humanist Manifesto”

  Posted: June 21st, 2008, 11:27am EDT by Todd

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  I picked up a copy of the May/June 2008 issue of The Humanist magazine this week to read a special about the 75th Anniversary of “A Humanist Manifesto,” which I have known about vaguely because of my studies of John Dewey. Reading the 1933 document in its entirety, I can somewhat see why it has [...]