090: Ep86 – French Bread Episode

Philosophy Bakes Bread radio show & podcast

In this 86th episode of Philosophy Bakes Bread, called “French Toast Episode,” Eric Thomas Weber and Anthony Cashio return to some tasty bread morsels from past episodes, voicemails, and recordings, moistening them with some egg, sugar, and cinnamon for a tasty treat. 

A plate of French toast.

In the first segment, we revisit a number of voicemails that we hadn’t had a chance to respond to in past episodes. Then, in segments two and three, we return to some material we recorded on the Upper West Branch of the Penobscott River in Maine, on a Philosophy Bakes Bread trip we took with Apeiron Expeditions. Our friends in the conversations were Seth Walton, Ben Vockley, and Alex Strong. Alex was our main guide and is the owner of Apeiron Expeditions. The three of them were our guests in Episode 75 of the show, titled “Outdoor Education.” And, Alex was our guest earlier in Episode 57, “Philosophy Outdoors.” Then, in the final segment of this episode, Anthony and I think back on our second year hosting the show, 2018. We list a bunch of our favorite episodes of the year. Give a listen and check out those episodes!

Listen for our “You Tell Me!” questions and for some jokes in one of our concluding segments, called “Philosophunnies.” Reach out to us on Facebook @PhilosophyBakesBread and on Twitter @PhilosophyBB; email us at philosophybakesbread@gmail.com; or call and record a voicemail that we play on the show, at 859.257.1849. Philosophy Bakes Bread is a production of the Society of Philosophers in America (SOPHIA). Check us out online at PhilosophyBakesBread.com and check out SOPHIA at PhilosophersInAmerica.com.

(1 hr 16mins)

Click here for a list of all the episodes of Philosophy Bakes Bread.

 

 

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Notes

  1. This episode was prepared and released in early 2019 as a reflection on our second year of the show, 2018. Thanks to all for your support and encouragement!

 

 

You Tell Me!

For our future “You Tell Me!” segments, tell us:

“Which was your favorite episode of 2018?”

Let us know what you think! Via TwitterFacebook, Email, or by commenting here below.

The Right to Life vs. the Right to Bodily Autonomy: Thomson’s “A Defense of Abortion”

One-Sheet for SOPHIA Conversations

Dr. Bertha Manninen of Arizona State University.Dr. Bertha Alvarez Manninen drafted this great SOPHIA One-Sheet document to talk about some important questions about America’s hottest topic: abortion, some of which arose in Episode 4 of Philosophy Bakes Bread, on “Shared Values in the Abortion Debate,” the subtitle of her book on the subject, Pro-Life, Pro-Choice. The Lexington SOPHIA Chapter is getting together on May 10th of 2019 to talk about abortion, a topic of increasing importance given recent changes to the make up of the U.S. Supreme Court and the many state laws that are likely to be tested in court.

A cropped portion of the cover of Dr. Manninen's book, which features sperm swimming, below the subtitle of the book, which is the title of this episode, as well as Dr. Manninen's name.

Logo of the Kentucky Humanities Council.SOPHIA is grateful to the Kentucky Humanities Council for a grant that supported the creation of this one-sheet document.

 

089: Ep85 – God Is a Question

Philosophy Bakes Bread radio show & podcast

Dr. William IrwinIn episode 85 of Philosophy Bakes Bread, Eric Thomas Weber and Anthony Cashio interview Dr. William Irwin today about his most recent book, God Is a Question, Not an Answer published in December 2018 with Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.

Image of a chalk board featuring question marks, with the cover of Dr. Irwin's book over top of it, which reads: 'God Is a Question, Not an Answer: Finding Common Ground in Uncertainty.'

Dr. Irwin is Herve A. LeBlanc Distinguished Service Professor and Chair of Philosophy at King’s College in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. He is also the author of The Free Market Existentialist (2015) and of Little Siddartha (2018). In addition, he is also the editor of numerous books on philosophy and popular culture, including: Seinfeld and Philosophy (1999), The Simpsons and Philosophy (2001), and The Matrix and Philosophy (2002). He was editor of these books and then General Editor of the Popular Culture and Philosophy Series through Open Court Publishing. In 2006, Irwin left Open Court to become the General Editor of The Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series, which includes Metallica and Philosophy (2007) and Black Sabbath and Philosophy (2012), among other volumes.

Listen for our “You Tell Me!” questions and for some jokes in one of our concluding segments, called “Philosophunnies.” Reach out to us on Facebook @PhilosophyBakesBread and on Twitter @PhilosophyBB; email us at philosophybakesbread@gmail.com; or call and record a voicemail that we play on the show, at 859.257.1849. Philosophy Bakes Bread is a production of the Society of Philosophers in America (SOPHIA). Check us out online at PhilosophyBakesBread.com and check out SOPHIA at PhilosophersInAmerica.com.


(1 hr)

Click here for a list of all the episodes of Philosophy Bakes Bread.

 

 

Subscribe to the podcast!

We’re on iTunes and Google Play, and we’ve got a regular RSS feed too!

Logo for Spotify that links to the Spotify page for Philosophy Bakes Bread.iTunes logo.Google PlayRSS logo feed icon and link.

 

 

 

Notes

  1. William Irwin’s God Is a Question, Not an Answer (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2019).
  2. Kamel Daoud, The Mersault Investigation (New York: Other Press, 2015).
  3. Albert Camus, The Stranger (New York: Knopf, 1993).
  4. William Irwin, Little Siddhartha: A Sequel (Brunswick, ME: Shanti Arts Publishing, 2018).
  5. Richard Rorty, “Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality,” in Stephen Shute, ed. On Human Rights: Oxford Amnesty Lectures (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 111-134.
  6. Bill’s philosophunny reference: Saturday Night Live’s “NPR Delicious Dish: Schweddy Balls,” Season 24, 1998:

 

 

You Tell Me!

For our future “You Tell Me!” segments, Bill asked the following question in this episode:

“What’s the last big issue that you could admit that you were wrong about?”

Let us know what you think! Via Twitter, Facebook, Email, or by commenting here below.

Du Boisian Double Consciousness and the Appropriation of Black Male Bodies in Jordan Peele’s Get Out

Civil American, Volume 4, Article 1 (April 16, 2019).

| By Darrius Hills and Seth Vannatta |

Adobe logo, to serve as a link to the Adobe PDF version of this essay.The Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him not true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. ~ W. E. B. Du Bois [1]

The lust—the libidinal desire—for the Black male’s body that serves as the motivation behind his condemnation and death is not altogether new. ~ Tommy J. Curry [2]

W. E. B. Du Bois

Black male bodies are bodies under siege. In the current historical moment, one polemical, ethical issue is the deadly interplay between the surveillance of black bodies and a burgeoning militarized police state. There are several sources of this extended surveillance and scrutiny of black male bodies in American race relations. Studies in higher education and the psychology of race have illustrated how black boys are mischaracterized as older in appearance and more aggressive in demeanor than their white counterparts.[3] There is also substantive research on the impact that implicit racial bias has on black men and boys in terms of health and well-being, imbalances in the criminal justice system, and overarching social stigma in everyday life.[4] This mode of surveillance and sanctioning, as we illustrate, also extends into the practices of sexual victimization of black boys and men, an understudied but prominent feature of the life experiences of black male bodies in past and contemporary American culture. Assaults against black male personhood and embodiment reveal the extent to which the American context has distinguished its racial hierarchy through the ostracizing of blackness-as-non-white. Such a social habitus featuring this racialized “twoness” reveals how black people and black bodies are problem people and problem bodies—imposing upon blacks America’s anxiety about “racial others.” To this end, we are concerned with a philosophical exploration of the experience and configuration of black bodies in Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) in light of the insights from W.E.B. Du Bois and in light of gender theories on the historical and contemporary constructions of black male sexuality and identity.

Du Bois’s theory of double consciousness provides one component of the theoretical lens we use to analyze Peele’s film. We investigate double consciousness, black male embodiment, and racial appropriation through an examination of the film’s symbolism relating to each as they influence the central character, Chris Washington. Du Bois outlined the former concept in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), while the themes of racial appropriation, exploitation, and surveillance of black male bodies were inaugurated in the slave trade and continue in contemporary cultural and economic practices.

Image of the cover of The Man-Not, by Dr. Tommy Curry.Tommy Curry’s recent text, The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood (2017) will assist our efforts to extend the film’s thematic focus on black male embodiment, sexual victimization, and racial appropriation. As Du Bois notes, African Americans are coerced to see themselves through the multiple and contradictory projections of whites. Black bodies are valued “only in terms of how white gazes value” them.[5] Black bodies, especially black male bodies, are denied complexity and humanity. Black men are, Curry remarks, “man-nots.” Black men are only bodies, problematic bodies to be tamed and controlled. Given the racializing, sexualizing, and criminalizing of black male bodies within the white racial imagination, Curry notes that black men exist only as negations—codified and mapped “in an anti-Black world” and “denied maleness in relation to white masculinity.” [6] [7] In Get Out, the black male as only body enables the continuation and safeguarding of white interests and futurity. Curry has framed this reality of black male life in terms of a practice of anti-black misandry—anti-black male sentiment—that is rooted paradoxically in both the fear and desire of black male flesh.

Curry captures the dual quality of fear of and desire for black male flesh in the notion of phallicism. Phallicism, notes Curry, invites, and further legitimizes societal suspicion and scorn, both in academic theory and in social institutions toward black men. Curry writes:

Phallicism refers to the condition by which males of a subordinated racialized or ethnicized group are simultaneously imagined to be a sexual threat and predatory, and libidinally constituted as sexually desirous by the fantasies or fetishes of the dominant racial group.[8]

Drawing upon the historical constructions of black manhood from slavery to Jim Crow and into the present, Curry presents phallicism as a frame for anti-black male sentiment and the resulting architecture of race and place imposed upon black male bodies. In a societal context in which all “male genitalia is conceptualized as a weapon wielded against women,” views of black men as problematic only bodies with a genetic and primordially-based proclivity for sexual violence are proffered as evidentiary support for the sanctioning, controlling, and killing of black men.[9] Here, black men are always already the rapists, the brutes, the savages, etc.; however, in this schema, black men also represent sexual desire. Because there is long historical precedent of black men (and women) being “hypersexualized as objects of desire, possession, and want,” another feature of black male experience that is under-examined involves the reality of sexual victimization of black men and boys.[10] In the great zeal to imagine black men as the always-already-hyper-rapist, the sexual vulnerability of black men as subordinate men trapped in a racial and sexual hierarchy that denies their personhood and agency goes unchecked.

A still image featuring Daniel Kaluuya, the lead actor in Jordan Peele's 'Get Out.'

Phallicism, then, as an accepted perspectival apprehension of and desire for black male embodiment, legitimates the use of coercion and control of the black male body as an only-body within the larger racial ecology of white male and female supremacy. Chris’s ordeal in Get Out creatively highlights that phallicism as a frame for misandry is a function of the collective white American psyche on black male bodies. Given the scope of Curry’s insights on this point, we argue, first, that Chris’s experience of double consciousness in the film discloses the white lust for the black male body concealed by the thin banalities of white liberal progressivism. Second, we show that Get Out illustrates Curry’s conclusion that Black men are treated as only problematic bodies in need of administrative control. Last, we demonstrate that Get Out highlights a yawning gap between the reality of white women as proxy patriarchs, culpable in advancing white supremacy, and the mythical view of them as both pure and passive non-participants.

(more…)

088: Ep84 – Feminism and Peace: Jane Addams’s Legacy

Philosophy Bakes Bread radio show & podcast

Dr. Patricia Shields.In episode 84 of Philosophy Bakes Bread, Eric Thomas Weber and Anthony Cashio interview Dr. Patricia Shields on “Feminism and Peace: Jane Addams’s Legacy.”

Jane Addams and other activists calling for peace.

Dr. Shields is editor of editor of Jane Addams: Progressive Pioneer of Peace, Philosophy, Sociology, Social Work, and Public Administration, published in 2017. She is also Professor of Political Science at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas, and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Armed Forces and Society, the leading peer-reviewed journal on civil-military relations. In addition, Pat has received many awards for excellence in teaching such as the National Association for Schools of Public Affairs and Administration, Leslie A. Whittington Excellence in Teaching Award (2002), The Texas State Presidential Award for Excellence in Teaching (2001), the Texas State Faculty Senate, Everette Swinney Teaching Award (2010) as well as the Professor of the Year Award from the Central Texas Chapter of the American Society for Public Administration (2006).

Listen for our “You Tell Me!” questions and for some jokes in one of our concluding segments, called “Philosophunnies.” Reach out to us on Facebook @PhilosophyBakesBread and on Twitter @PhilosophyBB; email us at philosophybakesbread@gmail.com; or call and record a voicemail that we play on the show, at 859.257.1849. Philosophy Bakes Bread is a production of the Society of Philosophers in America (SOPHIA). Check us out online at PhilosophyBakesBread.com and check out SOPHIA at PhilosophersInAmerica.com.

(1 hr, 4 mins)

Click here for a list of all the episodes of Philosophy Bakes Bread.

 

 

Subscribe to the podcast!

We’re on iTunes and Google Play, and we’ve got a regular RSS feed too!

Logo for Spotify that links to the Spotify page for Philosophy Bakes Bread.iTunes logo.Google PlayRSS logo feed icon and link.

 

 

 

Notes

  1. Patricia Shields’s book on Jane Addams.
  2. YouTube video sponsored by the Journal of Public Integrity on Jane Addams’s social ethics.
  3. Addams, J. (1880). Bread Givers. Rockford Daily Register.
  4. Addams, J. (1902). Democracy and Social Ethics. New York: MacMillan.
  5. Addams, J. (1907). Newer Ideals of Peace. New York: MacMillan.
  6. Addams, J. (1913). If men were seeking the franchise. Ladies Home Journal, vol. 30 (June).
  7. Addams, J. (1922). Peace and Bread in Times of War. New York: MacMillan.
  8. Addams, L. Balch, E. G., & Hanilton, A. (1915/2003) Women at the Hague: The International Congress of Women and its Results. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press.
  9. Hamington, M. (2009). The Social Philosophy of Jane Addams. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press.
  10. Haslanger, S. (2017). Jane Addams’s “Women and Public Housekeeping. In Schliesser, E. (Ed.) Ten Neglected Classics of Philosophy. Cambridge: Oxford University Press.
  11. Rissler, G. and Shields, Patricia (2018). Positive Peace – a necessary touchstone for Public Administration, Administrative Theory and Praxis. https://doi.org/10.1080/10841806.2018.1479549.
  12. Seigfried, C. (1996). Pragmatism and feminism: Reweaving the Social Fabric. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  13. Shields, P., & Soeters, J. (2017). Peaceweaving: Jane Addams, positive peace, and Public Administration. American Review of Public Administration, 47(3), 323–339.
  14. Shields, P.  (ed.) (2017). Jane Addams: Progressive Pioneer of Peace, Philosophy Sociology, Social Work and Public Administration. New York: Springer.
  15. Shields, P. (2017). Limits of Negative Peace, Faces of Positive Peace. Parameters, US Army War College Quarterly, 47(3), 1–12.
  16. Shields, P. (2006). Democracy and the Social Ethics of Jane Addams: A Vision for Public Administration. Administrative Theory and Praxis, 28, 418–443.
  17. YouTube video on Jane Addams and her Social Ethics, sponsored by the journal Public Integrity, and filmed in March 2018.

 

 

You Tell Me!

For our future “You Tell Me!” segments, Pat asked the following question in this episode:

“How do you suggest that we move to a world with less rigid belief structures so that we can resolve our differences?”

Let us know what you think! Via Twitter, Facebook, Email, or by commenting here below.