My blog

Here is my podcast! I also uploaded it to buzzsprout: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1903805/9721939 Here is the link to my template+paragraph reflection! https://docs.google.com/document/d/17ZaVsFsQGtQzbTaMgFVm2JamoETdWjgxLXZn8-_ZULQ/edit?usp=sharing

The Means Are Not Different From the Ends: Simone de Beauvoir and Black Lives Matter While the protests in the wake of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor’s killings were too large and decentralized to have a single goal, it seems fair to say that one major locus was systemic police violence against people of color.… Continue reading Protocol #10: Beauvoir

PODCAST REVIEW: A Beauvoir-ian Analysis of “Moral Exploitation” from Hi-Phi Nation (S1E2) Barry Lam opens the second episode of his popular philosophy podcast by asking a question: if war is sanctioned, are there tactics within the context of war that cross a moral line? Lam tackles this question by interviewing “solder philosophers,” or former soldiers… Continue reading Protocol #9

Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity contains an interlude about children’s moral development that sheds light on her argument that ethics lie in choosing freedom despite the unavoidable ambiguity of existence. Beauvoir’s ethics reject God or secular humanism. Like her fellow existentialists, there is no external moral imperative. Freedom highlights the self as a… Continue reading Protocol #8: Beauvoir

Albert Camus and Jean Paul Sartre describe the existential condition in similar terms: we are confronted with a world without fixed meaning, where we lack an essential human nature, and where emotions like anguish and anxiety dominate our senses. Both agree that the world sans God and sans coded morality opens up a kind of… Continue reading Protocol 10/28/21

The first important point Nietzsche makes about morality is that, historically, the first quality that distinguished the morally good from the morally bad was social rank. He calls this a “pathos of distance” between the “noble, powerful, high-stationed and high minded” and the “low, low-minded, common and plebeian” (26). This “pathos” was the historical origin… Continue reading Protocol #5: Nietzsche

To the question “who or what are we,” Kierkegaard suggests that we are beings with an intrinsic understanding of ethics (of what’s good or right). The content of our personality emerges when we behave either in accordance with these ethics or in accordance with our own desires.  Reading The Sickness Unto Death helped clarify a… Continue reading Protocol #4: Kierkegaard on Despair

Dear Reader,Sometimes I use language to express something without understanding or truly inhabiting the implications of eachword summoned. “Absurd” is such a word. Absurd is something unbelievable: “Oh, your teacher assigned an essayand a paper due on the same day? That’s absurd!” Absurd encapsulates shock, stun, utter disbelief; it is both hyperbolicand elegant. The root… Continue reading Protocol #2

In America, freedom is defined in terms of what one can and cannot do: I can vote for whoever I like; I can choose to attend Pitzer College; I cannot eat at a restaurant and not pay the bill. The absurd man, as Albert Camus argues, conceived of freedom differently. Given that one accepts Camus’… Continue reading Protocol #1