Paradigm Shifts Epstein Drive, Eros, and Thomas Kuhn By Nathaniel Goldberg “My drive would give us the edge that we needed to finally break free from Earth and build a new world for ourselves. That’s the wonderful and terrible thing about technology. It changes everything.” “Paradigm Shift,” season 2, episode 6 of The Expanse, mixes…
Can They Consent to Play the Squid Game? By Corey R. Horn Netflix’s fall blockbuster in 2021 is a South Korean drama where children’s games take a deadly turn. Squid Game began streaming in September and it took less than four weeks to become the streaming platform’s most successful launch to date. One of the…
Midnight Mass Merits in Morally Ambiguous Media By Tylor Cunningham Often, interpretive disagreements about artworks are the very things that make those works interesting and worth engaging in further. When two people pull seemingly contradictory themes or messages from a story, that’s an opportunity to come together and compare notes; to see if there’s something…
On the Moral Status of Bloodbending Davis Smith Introduction During their travels around the world of Avatar, our heroes have encountered many people with strange or unique bending abilities. For example, they encountered Combustion Man, who could make things explode with his mind (“The Headband” 23:24-23:48and “The Beach” 15:21-16:16). None, however, are more troubling and…
Competing Ethical Systems in Ghost of Tsushima by Armond Boudreaux In its depiction of medieval Japanese culture, its astonishingly beautiful landscapes and imagery, and its hyper-realistic combat, Ghost of Tsushima is ground-breaking. One remarkable thing about the game that might have gone relatively unnoticed, however, is the way in which it invites a sophisticated…
Damon Salvatore The Ultimate Vampire By Maria Pacheco de Amorim Far from being just another CW teen soap opera, The Vampire Diaries might be the moment that the vampire fiction initiated by Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) reached its highest state of self-awareness. Unlike Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which is really about the burden of a…
Death Stranding Sam Porter Bridges is Staying with the Trouble Kristien Hens Death Stranding, a video game by Hideo Kojima, tells the story of a devastated USA and humanity on the brink of falling victim to the sixth extinction. The outside world has become a dangerous place, with toxic rainfall and ghouls and terrorists.…
Call for Abstracts Mad Max and Philosophy Edited by David Koepsell and Matt Meyer The Blackwell Philosophy and Pop 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 Abstracts and subsequent essays should be philosophically substantial…
Money Heist The Philosophical Bond of Resistance Caterina Del Sordo Money Heist originally appeared as a Spanish TV show called “La Casa de Papel”. Netflix acquired global streaming rights in December 2017, and within a few months the series became one of the most watched TV shows in the world and the most watched non-English…
Call for Abstracts Star Wars and Philosophy Strikes Back Edited by Kevin S. Decker and Jason T. Eberl The Blackwell Philosophy and Pop 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 Abstracts and subsequent essays…
The Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series 