The Long Road

Arch and Umbrellas Originally uploaded by cplong11 NANJING, China - One of the challenges we face in higher education in the United States is how to ensure the academic success of the many new international students from China our universities are welcoming to campus each year. I am here at Nanjing University in part to create a cooperative program to better prepare students coming to Penn State from China for academic success. Because there is not a strong tradition of liberal arts education in China, part of this preparation involves articulating the meaning and value of the liberal arts.... (read more)

Brainstorming the @PubPhilJ Originally uploaded by cplong11 Mark Fisher, Lecturer and Director of Teaching and Learning with Technologies in the Philosophy Department and Assistant Director of the Rock Ethics Institute, joins me for episode 61 of the Digital Dialogue to talk about the vision and development of the Public Philosophy Journal. The Public Philosophy Journal is an open peer review journal that attempts to perform public philosophy as its mode of publication. These are the five steps involved in that process: Curate and Amplify: Current digital public philosophy discussions and pertinent web content will be curated through the use... (read more)

Chris Long and Adriel Trott at #APS13 Originally uploaded by cplong11 As many of you know, I have long been experimenting with how to use twitter effectively in academic contexts. Many are skeptical of twitter's ability to add substantive value to academic conversations because of its character constraints and its culture of snark and attempted witticisms. So, over the past few months I have sought to cultivate a different culture of academic community through interactive lectures in which I've live tweeted my own presentations at the University of San Francisco, the Catholic University of America and Newman University. Those... (read more)

Anne-Marie and Chris at Notre Dame Originally uploaded by cplong11 Anne-Marie Schultz, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Baylor Interdisciplinary Core at Baylor University, joins me at the 13th annual meeting of the Ancient Philosophy Society She is author of many articles in Ancient Greek Philosophy and on Plato specifically, including most recently: "The Narrative Frame of Plato's Euthydemus," Southwest Philosophy Review 24 (2009):163- 172; "You Are What You Read: Reading the Books of Augustine's Confessions," Augustinian Studies 39 (2008): 101-112; and "Socratic Reason and Emotion: Revisiting the Intellectualist Socrates in Plato's Protagoras," in Socrates: Reason or... (read more)

Long at NU Originally uploaded by cplong11 WICHITA, KS - The Liberal Arts are not so much a set of disciplines to be studied as they are a set of habits to be practiced. This is the central point and main theme around which my visit to Newman University in Wichita, KS is organized. These habits include the capacity to communicate effectively, to appreciate diversity, to perceive globally, and to respond to complexity with nuance. But the cardinal virtue of the liberal arts is ethical imagination: the disposition to envision new possibilities of more just, enriching relationships beyond existing... (read more)

Public Philosophy Journal Originally uploaded by cplong11 ATLANTA, GA -Publicness and collaboration are two of the virtues we hope the journal will embody. To that end, we want the creation and development of the journal to put those virtues into practice. So, our workshop at the Public Philosophy Network meeting at Emory University is designed to encourage both. Regarding publicness, we hope participants will join our online community by posting things about the journal and the workshop on your blogs, affinity groups, Facebook pages, Twitter and whatever other modes of social media communication you use. We encourage you to... (read more)

11/365: The Virtue of Dogs Originally uploaded by cplong11 ATLANTA, GA - There is a difference between the ways Socrates turns those with whom he speaks in Plato's dialogues to consider questions of justice, beauty and the good and the ways Plato's writing turns his readers to consider the same ideals. But there is also a strikingly analogous set of philosophical practices by which Socratic speaking enjoins interlocutors and Platonic writing enjoins readers to orient our lives toward the question of justice. These philosophical practices are themselves political insofar as they are capable of transforming human communities by allowing... (read more)

Roman Forum Originally uploaded by MarcelGermain As we begin to articulate the contours of the Public Philosophy Journal, some account of the meaning of the public philosophy the journal intends to practice may help us continue to cultivate the community on which success depends. Generally speaking, when Philosophy tries to go public, it takes one of two approaches. Either it seeks to articulate philosophical ideas in popular terms and through popular media - an approach adopted by the Stone in the New York Times, or it seeks to orient itself toward the "practical" by engaging in a variety of... (read more)

All threads lead here Originally uploaded by broo_am If, as Michael Bérubé suggested today in his Chronicle of Higher Education article "The Humanities, Unraveled," the situation in the humanities is "a seamless garment of crisis: If you pull on any one thread, the entire thing unravels," then stitching in any one area just may save the garment as a whole. By the end of the article, Bérubé is worried that departments will be "eliminated in the next strategic plan" if they take up in earnest the Alternative Academic career (#AltAc) challenge by empowering their graduate students to cultivate a... (read more)

46/365: Finishing a Draft Originally uploaded by cplong11 Philosophy is often mistakenly viewed as distant from public life, secluded in the Ivory Tower away from the public concerns of civil society. However, the affordances of digital scholarly communication have enabled philosophers increasingly to bring the value of their work to bear on matters of public importance from ethics and public policy to cultural criticism. Even so, however, there are few publishing venues available for philosophers to gain publicity for their work and to reach diverse audiences. The Public Philosophy Journal is designed to re-envision the relationship between the academy... (read more)