Seth Vannatta – författare

Since he burst on the world with his heavy-metal memoir Fargo Rock City in 2001, Chuck Klosterman has been one of the most successful novelists and essayists in America. His collections of essays Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs and Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas have established Klosterman not only as a credible spokesman for intelligent purveyors of popular culture. His writings and regular columns (in Spin, Esquire, The New York Times Magazine and other venues) about music, sports, and modern culture have sometimes become themselves touchstones in popular culture. The success of his card-based game Hypertheticals: 50 Questions for Insane Conversations has demonstrated that Klosterman can connect with his fans and readers even off the printed page. As he writes in his contribution to this book, Klosterman "enjoys writing about big, unwieldy ideas" as they circulate in culture, in people, in music, and in sports. The twenty-two other philosophers writing alongside Klosterman couldn't agree more.They offer their own take on the concepts and puzzles that fascinate him and take up many of Chuck's various challenges to answer brain-twisting "hypertheticals" or classic ethical quandaries that would arise if, say, Aristotle wandered backstage at a Kiss concert.

By many accounts, HBO's The Wire was and remains the greatest and most important television drama of all time. Conceived by writers David Simon and ex-Baltimore homicide detective Ed Burns, this five-season, sixty-episode tour de force has raised the bar for compelling, intelligent television production. With each season addressing a different arena of life in the city of Baltimore, and each season's narratives tapping into those from previous seasons, The Wire was able to reveal the overlapping, criss-crossing, and colliding realities that shape--if not control--the people, institutions, and culture of the modern American city. The Wire and Philosophy celebrates this show's realism as well as its intellectual and philosophical clarity. Selected philosophers who are fans of The Wire tap into these conflicts and interconnections to expose the underlying philosophical issues and assumptions and pursue questions, such as, can cops really tell whether they are smarter than their perps? Or do they fall victim to intellectual vanity? Do individuals really have free will to resist the temptations--of gangs, of drugs, or corruption--that surround them?Is David Simon a modern-day Marx who sees capitalism leading ultimately to its own collapse, or is Baltimore's story uniquely its own?

This book explores the relationship between metaphysics and the liberal arts.Part I contrasts the dualistic metaphysics of Platonism, Cartesianism, and materialisms, with the process metaphysics of William James, John Dewey, C.S. Peirce, and A.N. Whitehead with an eye toward illustrating how education should be treated as a transactive and interactive process whose objects of knowledge evolve through time. In Part II, the authors go on to investigate conceptions of the value of a liberal arts education, considering reactionary, conservative, pragmatist, and radical approaches.. Finally, in Part III, the authors explore connections between metaphysics and conservative, radical, and pragmatist conceptions of art, and demonstrate how process metaphysics can be extended to highlight the role of aesthetic experience both in understanding and appreciating art and in liberal arts education. A timely and unique exploration of the relationship between metaphysics and the liberal arts, this book will appeal to scholars, researchers, and faculty with interests in several branches of philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of education, and aesthetics.