Filmmaker Andrew Rossi's new documentary on the escalating costs of college and student debt features Deep Springs College as well as my teaching, depicting the education at Deep Springs as a hopeful alternative to destructive trends in mainstream higher education. I was fortunate to see the West Coast premiere at the Seattle International Film Festival two weeks ago and I recommend the film to anyone and everyone interested in thinking about the current landscape of higher education. (For more information on the film and the discussion around the cost of college and student debt, see the Ivory Tower website .) The shots of my course at Deep Springs come from a seminar I taught during Spring 2013 called "Freedom and the State." (The syllabus is available here .) Viewers will witness a few snippets of a much longer discussion on the penultimate sections of Hegel's Philosophy of Right . I'd love to hear what you think!
Don DeLillo’s The Names begins with what feels like a long camera take, trailing a character from behind as he walks around the streets of the Plaka, the central market district of Athens. The longer the shot continues, however, the more you realize that the man who’s leading you is not the central character. There’s someone, something else. You keep glimpsing it between the blocks, above the antennas and awnings and electrical wires. It’s apparitional, a massive presence that seems to hover in the middle distance, glimmering and impassive beneath the bright Mediterranean sunshine. At long last the character stops in an open plaza, pauses, then looks up. The camera follows. The Acropolis rises like a brilliant white column shooting skyward, its pillars and pediments strident yet effortless. The high city. I gasped when I first glimpsed the Acropolis. I was stepping onto the balcony of an apartment I’d rented for six weeks in Kolonaki, a wealthy neighborhood in central Athens. My h...
Another year begins! Although I can't help wishing summer were longer, I love the thrill of fall semester, with its rites of convocation, first day butterflies, and rush at the bookshop. This semester, I also return to my own first semester of college, since I'll teach texts I first read then -- Hobbes' Leviathan and Locke's Second Treatise -- in my Modern Political Philosophy course. Here's the title page of the Hackett edition of Hobbes' Leviathan that I first bought at the Carleton Bookshop in September 1999 for Laurence Cooper's Introduction to Political Philosophy course. Twenty-six years ago -- and it's still a challenge! (You'll note that I haven't taught with this edition every time I've taught Hobbes; I've also used the Cambridge from time to time.) I'm also teaching another iteration of Governing the Self and Others this fall. I begin with Rousseau's Social Contract, but then go in many new directions, including Mic...