Never Die Cobra Kai and Albert Camus Edwardo Pérez In Netflix’s 13 Reasons Why, Hannah Baker finds thirteen reasons to kill herself – among them, she’s been raped, her friends embarrass and betray her, and her reputation is ruined when she’s labeled a slut. For anyone, these are difficult issues to deal with, and for…
Rick and Morty: Meaning in a Meaningless Multiverse by Danny Krämer The American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars diagnosed a conflict between what he called “the scientific and the manifest image of man-in-the-world.” The scientific image contains things like quarks, bosons, and black holes. By contrast, the “manifest image” is our everyday way of viewing the world…
Monty Python and The Meaning of Albert Camus By Luc Pelletier Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life is a disjointed, confusing piece of cinema. The sketches presented hang together by a thin thread, namely the quest for the meaning of life. Sometimes, without warning or apparent reason, the movie interrupts itself to take us in…
The Last Jedi Nihilism, Übermenschen, and a Rey of Hope by Edwardo Pérez The Force Awakens ended beautifully, with Rey and Luke Skywalker staring at each other, standing atop an island mountain, with a lightsaber between them – held out by Rey in a gesture of respect and hope. It’s such a significant moment in…
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…
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…
Slipknot Meets Camus By Ashley Whitaker In an interview concerning the motivation for creating .5: The Gray Chapter, singer Corey Taylor states: … [Slipknot] present reality the way it is, but we also try to put that positivity in … we are trying to free people’s mind and say, Look, this reality is only real…
Alice in Chains and Philosophy: Camus Gets a Facelift Søren R. Frimodt-Møller The year 2013 included two important landmarks for fans of philosophy and in Alice in Chains: The centennial celebration of French philosophical author Albert Camus (1913-1960) and The release of the Alice in Chains album The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here. To see the…
The Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series 