“Chidi Kills Janet!” Unpacking Sentience and the Moral Status of AI
This clip, “Chidi Kills Janet!,” from the first season of NBC’s The Good Place, lets us gauge our intuitions about how computers fit with...
Zen and the Art of Automotive Design
This brief Mazda advertisement describes the Japanese philosophy of jinba-ittai, the experience of a rider being one with their horse through the communication of...
Engineers, Expertise, and Organizations: The Challenger Space Shuttle Disaster
A central component of my Engineering Ethics course, which you can read more about in the Blog of the APA’s Syllabus Showcase series, is...
Flirting with Personhood: Will Smith’s Date with Sophia the Robot
With the increased prevalence of AI chatbots on dating apps, many users wonder if their date-to-be is really a person. The following clip depicts...
Smart Ass Pawn: Ideology and Ideological Interpellation in The Wire
For the most part, The Wire (2002-2008) has been embraced by educators for its realism, for the way that it shows in almost journalistic...
John Cage’s 4’33” and Experimental Phenomenology
Death Metal band Dead Territory has a wonderful video cover of John Cage’s 4'33" that I use in my Introduction to Latin American Philosophy...
Collecting Nuts and Bolts: Reintroducing the Teaching and Learning Video Series
Whenever I teach an introductory-level philosophy course, I spend some time working through different reading strategies with my students, who are largely unfamiliar with...
The Godfather’s Mafia Meeting Scene: A Fictional Narrative of Hobbesian Contractarianism
Whenever I teach the undergraduate courses of Ethical Theory and Contemporary Social Ethics, I include The Godfather’s mafia meeting scene as part of these...
Teaching Moral Reasoning with Terminator and Jesus
Semester after semester, I embarked on helping students to appreciate that morally relevant decisions are not a matter of personal preference, and I struggled...
Dusty Slay and Zhuangzi’s Three in the Morning
Comedian Dusty Slay tells a story about trying to purchase some DVDs at a flea market. The DVDs are cheap: three for five dollars....