Call for Abstracts Doctor Strange and Philosophy Edited by Mark D. White The Blackwell Philosophy and Popular Culture Series Please circulate and post widely. Apologies for cross posting. To propose ideas for future volumes in the Blackwell series please contact the Series Editor, William Irwin, at williamirwin@kings.edu If you have comments or criticisms for the series,…
Avenged Sevenfold Explores the Polarized Mind on “The Stage” By Ashley Whitaker The music video for Avenged Sevenfold’s song “The Stage” opens with a small audience entering a puppet show, uncertain of what to expect. Soon it becomes clear that the audience has paid to witness graphic depictions of historical atrocities. Laughing at portrayals of…
“I Ain’t Gonna Be Part of Your System!” Lonely Island, Bernie Sanders, and Faux-Revolutionaries By Matthew William Brake This has been a wild election season. The Republican Party has allowed the worst caricature of its own populist impulses to become its nominee. And for its part, the Democratic Party has chosen Hillary Clinton—an establishment, left-leaning, and…
The Strange World of Planet Earth: Prophetic Criticism and Ecological Crisis By Jack Holloway “Since the world began, ever-inventive man has constantly pushed forward into the unknown. One by one, the frontiers of science have fallen before him. . . . Now he stands on the threshold of a new age—a terrifying age.” So begins…
Compassion in a Virtual State of Nature Catfish The TV Show and Philosophy By Randee Melançon and Jérôme Melançon To “catfish” is for a person to engage in an online relationship on the basis of lies about parts or all of who they are. With no government law or authority to appeal to, victims of…
Independence Day First as Tragedy, Then as Farce By Matthew William Brake When it came out in 1996, Independence Day was the first PG-13 movie I ever saw, and I loved it! Independence Day was an awesome summer blockbuster. It hit the right combination of action, drama, and comedy. In 2016, its successor, Resurgence,…
Forbidden Planet and the Invisible Claw of Global Capitalism By Jack Holloway In the 23rd century, people of Earth are travelling the universe searching for their next object of conquest. After having lost contact with an expedition to the planet Altair IV, Commander John Adams and a crew have been sent to discover what happened.…
Kevin Decker and Jason Eberl, the editors of The Ultimate Star Trek and Philosophy, discuss deep thought in deep space with Newsweek. Read all about it here.
Post-Historical Art: Outlanders Virtual Memory of Transportable Selves By Myron Jackson Outlander is a proto-dramatic hybrid of history, culture, medicine, and love told and performed in literary and cinematic form through the experiential memory of Claire Beauchamp. Akin to Marcel Proust’s six-volume work In Search of Lost Time, the novel and TV series spans…
Our sense of self may just be malleable enough to where we could come to identify (at least temporarily) with the characteristics of online profiles; the more others respond to us as the characters we’ve created, the more we might come to internalize a sense of self that resembles the character. While this does not mean that we’ll likely ever mistake ourselves consciously for the character, we might temporarily forget (when talking to others) that the “us” others see is anyone other than “us in RL.”
The Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series 