All posts tagged: APA

Evil in Narrative Fiction | Blog of the APA

Evil in Narrative Fiction | Blog of the APA

Published by Jenni Sidey

Imagine you read Kant. You may disagree with him, you may be bored by his style, but you will persevere, for after all, he has important things to say. Now imagine any narrative fiction: You read a novel, watch a movie or TV series, or read a comic. It has something important to say, yet if you’re bored, you will probably close the book or switch off whatever device you’re using. This makes narrative fiction different from other texts. It is not that narrative fiction is not interested in truth. Philosopher Martha Nussbaum will tell you that novels explore complex ethical situations better than philosophical treatises. But they will not do so at the expense of their first aim, which is keeping readers engaged. Evil is constitutive of the kind of ethical situations Nussbaum considers, and, like narrative, it keeps us hooked. We’re fascinated by evil, and so evil is perfect for narrative fiction and engagement. In narrative, evil comes in all shapes: the evil of Elizabeth’s younger sister in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice …

Foraging Thoughts | Blog of the APA

Foraging Thoughts | Blog of the APA

Published by Jenni Sidey

Wikimedia commons image, retrieved from: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/78/Ripe%2C_ripening%2C_and_green_blackberries.jpg Few joys in my childhood memory rival the picking of blackberries under the scorching Greek sun. The rising dust, the dry and hot wind, the curious scurrying insects, and most of all, the sturdy thorns of the blackberry bush could not rival the soft consistency of the berries in my hand, and their sweet, if slightly sour flavor. Being able to feast on our loot with my sibling in the late afternoon, surrounded by the smell of pines, rosemary, and sea salt, made each scratch we got from blackberrying more than worth it, a proud war wound. I did not take many of my childhood habits into my adulthood. However, to take my bike, some huge glass jars, maybe a small step ladder, and to wander alone the nearby parks and forests in search of blackberries is still my favorite way to spend a weekend day in July. Not only that: I am slowly expanding my foraging skills. Last October, I went through the tedious task of picking elderberries …

APA Members Interview, Megan Craig

APA Members Interview, Megan Craig

Published by Jenni Sidey

Megan Craig is an artist, essayist, and Associate Professor Philosophy at Stony Brook University. She is the author of Levinas and James: Toward a Pragmatic Phenomenology and (with Edward S. Casey) Thinking in Transit: Explorations of Life in Motion. www.megancraig.com Instagram: @waterstreetprojects What is your favorite sound in the world? Rain, church bells, cicadas in the heat and peepers in early spring evenings, my dog’s sigh, my girls laughing or singing. Name a trait, skill, or characteristic that you have that others may not know about. I love singing and songwriting. When I was a child, I desperately wanted to play the saxophone, but it was too expensive to rent. I took piano lessons and taught myself to play a little guitar. I dated musicians and wanted to be in a band. In college, I wrote a bunch of songs and then gave it up for years until recently when I started thinking about new melodies while driving. I have been working on an album about Dante’s Inferno. What is your favorite film of all …

APA Member Interview, Eva Dadlez

APA Member Interview, Eva Dadlez

Published by Jenni Sidey

Eva Dadlez is Professor Emerita of philosophy at the University of Central Oklahoma and currently resides in Ithaca, NY. She received her PhD from Syracuse University. She writes on issues at the intersection (sometimes the collision) of aesthetics, ethics, and epistemology.  Link to your website: evadadlez.com What excites you about philosophy? In the beginning, nothing excited me about philosophy. I didn’t take a single philosophy course as an undergrad. When I was doing a Masters in an entirely unrelated field, a friend (now my husband of nearly 50 years) told me about his graduate-level aesthetics class. “Wait. So these people think they can determine what art is without being able to draw their way out of a paper bag?” I asked in some umbrage. I’d been doing paid art and illustration for years as a side gig. “I have to take that class! What can they be thinking?” I took it as an elective (I had one elective course in my program, and I’d been hoarding it). The class was a revelation. When ways in …

Atmospheres of Parenthood | Blog of the APA

Atmospheres of Parenthood | Blog of the APA

Published by Jenni Sidey

Anyone who has visited the home of parents with a newborn baby can recognize from the outset a specific kind of atmosphere that seems to fill the space. It is often an atmosphere of anticipation, exhilaration, chaos, and apprehension that is tangible and felt “in the air.” The parents themselves seem to be expressions of the atmosphere, weighed down by fatigue if not anxiety but simultaneously awestruck by their new arrival. Both parents and visitors can perceive and feel the atmosphere even if both parties interpret the phenomenon differently. Such experiences raise the question of what kind of a phenomenon parenthood is. From a historical perspective, this question seems straightforward. Traditionally, parenthood has tended to refer to biological, legal, and moral categories. While these categories are vital to the concept of parenthood, parenthood is nevertheless irreducible to them. We can also think of parenthood as a “transformative experience,” one that cannot be fully grasped in advance, because becoming a parent constitutes a new kind of self. But parenthood involves more than the transformation of one’s …

APA Member Interview, Elena Comay del Junco

APA Member Interview, Elena Comay del Junco

Published by Jenni Sidey

Elena Comay del Junco is Assistant Professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut. Her research focuses on the history of philosophy, primarily Ancient Greek and Islamic philosophy. Recent and forthcoming work includes essays on Aristotle’s and Ibn Sina’s accounts of love as well as a translation of Ibn Sina’s commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics Λ. She also teaches and writes on questions of gender and feminism. In addition to her scholarly endeavors, she also writes criticism, poetry, and fiction; recent publications include an essay on the novelist Pierre Guyotat and a translation of an 18th-century comic opera about Aristotle’s sex life. What are you reading right now? Would you recommend it? I have bad habit of reading too many things at once, but among those is Rumi’s Masnavi, which I’ve been slowly working through in a bilingual edition to teach myself Persian. I’m about 1,200 of 24,000 couplets of the way in and would, at least on that basis, recommend it. The skepticism about the popularization of Rumi is in some sense justified—in addition to …

Survey and Community Conversation about APA Online Programming

Survey and Community Conversation about APA Online Programming

Published by Jenni Sidey

Inside the APA As announced earlier this year, the APA’s three divisions collectively decided to suspend the  2+1 experiment, returning to hosting only in-person divisional meetings beginning in 2027. In making this difficult decision, the divisional executive committees recognized the importance of values underlying the 2+1 experiment, especially accessibility, inclusion, and sustainability. We are now organizing a community conversation about actions the APA can take to honor these values through other forms of online programming. Before turning to that conversation, we would like to share with our members some of the data that contributed to the decision the end the experiment: Fewer paper submissions. For the online meetings, there were more than 30–40% fewer papers submitted than for recent in-person meetings. Lower registration. For the Central Division, the online meeting registration was 14% lower than the 10-year average. For the Pacific Division, the online meeting registration was 28% lower than the 10-year average. Declines in APA membership due to lower participation. Many people join the APA or renew their membership to submit papers or get …

KJ Apa Calls Out Mr. Fantasy For Stealing His Image: ‘Completely Wrong’

KJ Apa Calls Out Mr. Fantasy For Stealing His Image: ‘Completely Wrong’

Published by Daniella Wilson

It appears KJ Apa has some beef with himself? His alter ego? It’s not exactly clear, but the Riverdale actor has officially taken to social media to call out Mr. Fantasy. In September 2025, Mr. Fantasy initially went viral for not only his eccentric personality, quirky style and signature black bob, but also because fans were convinced he was Apa’s alter ego. To back up their theories, fans point out that the pair have the exact same tattoos. Up until now, the actor hasn’t addressed the comparisons that have been swirling on social media for months, especially as Mr. Fantasy has continued to see his star power rise from garnering more than 1.2 million followers on TikTok to performing his song “Mr. Fantasy” at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. On Wednesday, Apa posted a lengthy video on his Instagram (below), calling out the singer for stealing his image. “So there has been something going on for a long time that I haven’t addressed because I didn’t think it was even worth addressing,” the actor said …

Protesting For Our Humanity | Blog of the APA

Protesting For Our Humanity | Blog of the APA

Published by Jenni Sidey

Every Sunday for two years, from October 2023 to October 2025, protesters gathered in the center of Melbourne, Australia, to march against Israel’s war on Gaza. With numbers sometimes swelling to up to 25,000, the protests became a recurring moment for those horrified by the IDF’s actions to come together and share their anger and their grief. These mass displays of outrage and solidarity were met in some quarters, however, by a mix of irritation and bemusement: What could such protests possibly hope to achieve, here on the other side of the world, in a state that—if we’re being honest—ranks as a middling power at best? In 1985, philosopher and environmentalist Val Plumwood went canoeing in Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory of Australia. Alone and far from any human habitation, Plumwood was attacked by a saltwater crocodile—arguably the most ferocious of Australia’s native animals. After miraculously surviving, here is how she described that encounter: “This was a strong sense, at the moment of being grabbed by those powerful jaws, that there was something …

APA Member Interview: Felipe De Brigard

APA Member Interview: Felipe De Brigard

Published by Jenni Sidey

The APA Blog is publishing excerpts from Cliff Sosis’s long-form interviews with philosophers, which appear at his blog, What Is It Like to Be a Philosopher? The excerpts below are from an interview originally published on March 20, 2026, and reprinted with permission from Cliff Sosis. In this interview, Felipe De Brigard; Professor of Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience; Faculty member of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience; and Associate of the Duke Initiative for Science & Society talks about growing up among and learning to live with bombs, kidnappings, and conflicts in Colombia during the time of Pablo Escobar, Catholicism, Dungeons and Dragons, aspirations to become a priest, hormones, Nietzsche, theater, Descartes, attending the National University of Colombia, memory and Aristotle; applying to and being rejected from 10 grad schools; how Adrian Cussins helped him get into Tufts, Fodor, beer pong, Dennett, and working at the Danish Pastry House; contemplating going to grad school for neuroscience and getting into UNC philosophy; the differences between public and private universities; working with Prinz, Knobe, Lycan, Dorit Bar-On, and eventually Kelly Giovanello …