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- "Preferred seating refers to seats reserved for customers purchasing full-price unrestricted airfare." Behold my ability to shop elsewhere. about 15 minutes ago from web
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My name is Adam Potthast and I am a philosophy professor at Park University in Kansas City, MO. I'm also the co-author of Ethics for Dummies. I tend to post mostly on ethics, Kantian ethics, politics, teaching and technology. More than you ever wanted to know can be found in the About Me section.Pages
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Monthly Archives September 2008
For make glorious great nation of America
This is pretty funny. I’d credit where I found it, but I’ve seen it all over the net today: > Dear American: > > I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude. > > I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic [...]
Simply applying the Categorical Imperative
Many people studying ethics for the first time are scared off by the first formulation of Kant’s categorical imperative: Act only on that maxim (principle) which you can at the same time will to be a universal law. You’re constrained to acting on principles that can be willed to be universal laws. But the easiest [...]
Howling Fantods
So in the last four years, we’ve lost Hunter S. Thompson, Vonnegut, Carlin, and now David Foster Wallace. Would all the people we need stop dying please?
I Wish You Way More than Luck
Earlier this evening, I heard the sad news that David Foster Wallace, author of one of my favorite books (Infinite Jest), had taken his own life at the age of 46. Foster Wallace was one of the sharpest and funniest authors of recent years and I’ll miss him a great deal. For those of you [...]
Shapes of Freedom: The Kingdom of Ends (Kantopias, Part 2)
[This post is a continuation of Kantopias, Part 1] So before we look at the details of these Kantopias, there is one last thing that Kant could have said in the third formulation of the Categorical Imperative, and didn’t. He could have argued that we should “act in accordance with universal laws for a merely [...]
The Higgs Boson
So late last week the Large Hadron Collider was switched on. As we all know, this was a European attempt to pre-emptively destroy the world before a hypothetical McCain-Palin administration does. But advertising the true purpose of the LHC is problematic, so physicists say that they really built it to find something called the Higgs [...]
Great Software for Academics: Dropbox
One of the principal technology problems that a lot of academics face is dealing with keeping files current on more than one computer. Most of us have a computer at work and at least one computer at home. In my case, I have a desktop and a laptop I use for conferences (and, well, in [...]
9/11/2008
So this semester I’m teaching political philosophy, which is pretty exciting when you have a non-stop newsfeed of political content. 11 September is coming up again and I was contemplating doing a special session that had something to do with it. It was then I realized that for (traditional) students, the best case is that [...]
Palin’s Acceptance Speech
Ok, I swear this will be my last political post for at least a little while. As I twittered immediately afterward, I thought the speech was very strong. Insanely unfair, mocking, and inaccurate in a lot of places (particularly about taxes), but strong. Red meat for the base. I think McCain has lucked out so [...]