This is the final installment of "Power and Pleasure at the Dinner Table." Find part 1, An Invitation, part 2, The Party Table, and part 3, The Community Table, in previous posts. I intuitively feel the pull of how eating together can be pleasurable, a site of connection. Yet I suspect many of us likely have examples of exclusion when it comes to sharing food with others. Sometimes feelings of exclusion indicate opportunities for new experiences, such as being an omnivore at a vegan potluck. … [Read more...]
The Community Table
This is the third installment of "Power and Pleasure at the Dinner Table." Find part 1, An Invitation, and part 2, The Party Table, in previous posts. Community happens around tables: we play puzzles, games, and music, share meals, plan camping trips or political actions. Tables are sites where people celebrate or grieve together. The political thinker Hannah Arendt describes human togetherness by using a table as a metaphor. You may recognize Arendt’s name. She is perhaps best known for … [Read more...]
Poets for the animals
I've been thinking about story-telling and relationships with particular animals. Consider the following two snippets: Peter Singer doesn’t love animals In the preface to the 1975 edition of Animal Liberation, Peter Singer shares a story about a time he was invited to tea. He'd begun working on Animal Liberation. Much to the surprise of his host, Singer admitted that he isn't an animal lover (p. 9). Singer came to his theory of animal liberation through rational argument, not a relationship … [Read more...]
Arendt and outer space
In the span of a month I'll have been to Washington DC, Guelph, Atlanta, and Edmonton. I'm half-way through what I'm jokingly referring to as my "Spring Speaking Tour." Both my rats and my students might forget what I look like. This post is less of a blog and more about what-I've-been-up-to. Mostly I've been thinking about Arendt and science fiction, both separately and together. I wrote about these two together in the first entry to this blog, focusing on the task of philosophy as Arendt … [Read more...]
What’s private about the Private Sponsorship of Refugees program?
In the next series of posts, I want think through Canada's Private Sponsorship of Refugees (PSR) program. This series is part of my broader project on Hannah Arendt's conception of the rootlessness of refugees, the condition in which refugees are uprooted from their geographic, cultural, and political homes. In this post, I want to ask a few questions about the conceptual work "the private" is doing in PSR using Arendt's view of the public/private distinction. In later posts, I want to … [Read more...]