Tag: philosophy

  • Drones in Theory and in Practice

    Drones in Theory and in Practice

    Reviewed in this essay: Killing by Remote Control: The Ethics of an Unmanned Military, edited by Bradley J. Strawser, Oxford University Press, 2013.  Academic philosophers working on topics in applied ethics, such as drone usage, insist on distinguishing between permissibility in theory and permissibility in practice. In claiming that current U.S. drone policies are impermissible in practice,…

  • TRB Podcast: Stefan Bird-Pollan on the Oedipus complex and the problem of colonial father figures

    TRB Podcast: Stefan Bird-Pollan on the Oedipus complex and the problem of colonial father figures

    On September 18, the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto invited Professor Stefan Bird-Pollan to deliver a lecture, titled “Fanon, Freud and the Intersubjective Sources of Colonial Psychopathology.” In his abstract, Bird-Pollan writes that his talk uses Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex to illuminate Fanon’s diagnosis of the widespread breakdown of intersubjective relations…

  • Why Not? Fifteen Reasons to Live by Ray Robertson

    Why Not? Fifteen Reasons to Live by Ray Robertson

    Reviewed in this essay: Why Not? Fifteen Reason to Live by Ray Robertson. Biblioasis, 2011. It is November in Toronto. I could use fifteen or so reasons to live right now. Ray Robertson implies a big answer with his new title. Having just completed a draft of a novel and experiencing an OCD-induced depression, Robertson…