Wonder Woman, Schopenhauer, and Compassion It’s not about What They Deserve Jacob M. Held “It’s not about what they deserve. It’s about what you believe.” Exactly! It is difficult to be a “yes-sayer” in a world of war, refugees, famine, murder, and so much human, all too human ugliness. But amidst all the pain and…
The Epistemology of “Pretty Little Liars” by Victoria Lavorerio Pretty Little Liars has been crowned the most-tweeted show on television, and its general presence in social media is impressive. If you’ve never seen the show, you may think that these feats are probably due to its mostly millennial audience. But if you have watched at…
Captain Underpants and The Philosophy of Humor! Edwardo Pérez One of the best scenes in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas is when Joe Pesci’s Tommy berates Ray Liotta’s Henry after Henry told Tommy “You’re really funny.” As Tommy repeatedly asks Henry: “How am I funny?” What’s great about the scene is that as funny as Pesci’s Tommy…
Extending Life in Orphan Black Edwardo Pérez How long do you want to live? If it were possible, would you want an extra twenty years? How about forty more? What about doubling your lifespan? Or, why not just shoot for immorality? Maybe that’s going too far. Besides, isn’t mortality the point? If we were immortal,…
Eternal Return in The 100 Edwardo Pérez We have to let our children fail, make mistakes, fall down … don’t we? It doesn’t matter what we try to teach them, in the end, they have to learn on their own. We can guide them, offer advice, help them as best we can but we can’t…
Finding The Better Angels Of Our Nature in The 100 Edwardo Pérez There are two things we need to survive: pain and fear. When they work right, they motivate us to preserve ourselves. But, if we let pain and fear overtake us, then the opposite happens and instead of fighting to live we convince ourselves…
Iron Man, the Syrian Refugee Crisis, and Noam Chomsky By Matthew William Brake I have the coolest girlfriend in the world. I set a goal that we would watch all of the movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe all the way through, and she agreed! So we were watching Iron Man the other night (which…
Unnatural Selection in The 100 Edwardo Pérez Death is a fate we all share. And yet, we do whatever we can to give ourselves and our children an advantage over death, anything to increase the odds of survival to cheat death and prolong life, because most of us aren’t willing to accept its inevitability.…
The Gift of Death in The 100 Edwardo Pérez How do we want to die? It’s not a question most of us want to contemplate. We don’t want to think about the end of our lives much less plan them. End-of-life planning is something we put off or don’t do (or we buy stock in…
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D Hydra: Descartes’ Nightmare Scenario By Armond Boudreaux The current story arc in Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D (AoS) uses a computer-generated artificial environment called The Framework to explore what might have happened if Hydra had succeeded in taking over S.H.I.E.L.D. Besides giving us the opportunity to see some of our favorite heroes at…
The Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series 