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.”
Personhood in Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood By Darian Shump Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood follows the adventures of Edward Elric, a State Alchemist employed by the military of Amestris, and Alphonse, his younger brother. After an aborted attempt to resurrect their mother through an illegal form of alchemy, the pair finds themselves on the brink of death.…
Check out this interview about the Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series at Four Letter Nerd.
J. Edward Hackett, editor of House of Cards and Philosophy: Underwood’s Republic has written about Season 4. Warning: spoilers. Click here to read all about it.
30 Years of Master of Puppets and Philosophy “Honesty is my only excuse” By William Irwin It was 30 years ago today, March 3, 1986, and I was about to turn sixteen. Actually, I remember hearing “Battery” for the first time on my friend Joe’s boom box weeks earlier. He had taped it off…
Red Dwarf and the Gift of Life by Zoran Kojcic Red Dwarf is a British sci-fi sitcom that follows the adventures of the last human being in the universe, David Lister. Because he was being held in suspended animation as a punishment, Lister survived a massive accident on a mining space ship, Red Dwarf. After…
The Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series 