Anne's Philosophy Blog

  “No, Ernie, says Agata, there’s no plot, we’re only women talking.” ―  Miriam Toews,  Women Talking " Where's my syllabus to guide me through life?                                         Megan Mc Cafferty "Come quickly, I am tasting the stars!" - Dom Pérignon I was having a hard time sleeping a few nights back.  So, I stayed up reading Women Talking .  It has been on my Kindle a long time and I started reading it a while back. I put it down partly because of difficult content, but also I was having a bit of difficulty following all the characters. I've picked it up here and there but I got hooked into it this time read it to the end and was completely blown away.  What an amazing book!   It is so well-written and well-crafted.  Anyway, with the excellence of the end in mind,  I was still not sleepy so I started readi...

  "This is a new year. A new beginning. And things will change."  Taylor Swift Taylor  Swift is everywhere these days.  So why not a Taylor Swift quote for the new year. I sort of missed the Taylor Swift craze. I mean obviously I know who she is  in that I don't live under a rock, but I never really listened to her music.  But I had a student last semester, named Taylor, as it turns out  and she did her classical presentation on issues of intellectual property and creativity surrounding her buying and rerecording her songs.  And so we sort of had a Taylor Swift class commentary going all semester. Definite male/ female divide on this one. But the presentation was excellent and it is clear she means A LOT to  A LOT of young females, so I started to become intrigued.  Then, I read a fascinating article about her in the NYTimes a couple days ago about herm at the very least,  strong allyship with the queer community and I again found ...

  “Books are the mirrors of the soul.”― Virginia Woolf Well, this year of reading started off with the project of reading all the books the students chose for the Philosophy in Literature  class.   Here's the blog post about that   https://teachingphilosophyandyoga.blogspot.com/2023/03/philosophy-in-literature-censorship.html  Fahrenheit 451 and Slaughterhouse Five have really stuck with me over the year.  And  some of the books from that reading project  led to me reading other books by the same author. For example,  The Hate You Give  by Angie Thomas  led to  reading  Concrete Rose  and  On the Come Up.   All these are highly readable, about important timely topics  such as  race, violence, poverty, and the power of human endurance.  The Testaments which  we read for the class  led to a return to Margaret Atwood.  Her collection of  short stories ...

 " Any new beginning is forged from the shards of the past, not from the abandonment of the past." Craig D. Lounsbrough I didn't mean to start a new blog, but somehow I have locked myself out of the old one and as I was making the new one,  I decided that  yes, indeed, it is time for a new start.    You can find the new blog at  annemarieschultz.blogspot.com .   All the content of teachingphilosophyandyoga.blogspot.com is there, worry not.  I am nearing the end of organizing Dad's stuff.  Somewhere in this process, I decided I could get rid of some of the shards of my own past,  i.e. boxes of childhood cards, letters, awards and the like. Also a bunch of journals. A detailed record of my teenage escapades does not need to fall into anyone else's hands.      Anyway,  on New Year's Day  I burned two boxes of said things and it felt remarkably cathartic. Some things caught my eye as I was dropping items into t...