USUPhilosophy

See the results of a largish poll here.

Is there a ‘standard’ font to use?  Times New Roman 12 seems pretty standard to me.  Huenemann, do you see much in the way of requiring a certain font for article or other manuscript submissions?

I don’t hate Times New Roman, but I have been playing with my Course Packets in the new iWork programs and am tempted by some other fonts that look to me to be readable and easy on the eyes over a long course packet (200 pages).  (Book Antiqua, Baskerville, Modern No. 20 and Palatino, if you are curious.  I also really like Weiss,which you can pay to download.  It is a typeface designed by Geman typographer Emil Rudolph Weiss (1875-1943).)

It does seem there are certain ‘canonical’ fonts (Times New Roman, Helvetica (which Mac use as default), Arial, and my wife tells me she sees a lot more Calibri, which she says is the PC Office 07 default).  I wonder why those and not others?  Anyway, now that they are canonical, maybe I should stick to Times New Roman.  Reading student papers, I do get annoyed with varying fonts. Your eyes get used to one and it is hard to shift gears.  In fact, I require many of my papers to be done in TNR 12 (in part because they have length maximums so I don’t want font games).

Thoughts on this pressing matter? (hey, it is summer!).

Here is an interesting article on Teaching in the 21st Century.  It asks the question – is our pedagogical method which values ‘critical thinking’ really helping our students, or are we just passing along our high-minded suspicion and starving out any real thirst for truth?  A more provocative question (and I am intentionally picking a fight here, I don’t know if I believe what I am about to say): is Huenemanniaism simply a mode of suspicion?  In other words, far from truth seeking does it instead see ‘the moment of seeing falsehood [as] the goal and summit of the intellectual life.’ ?

I should add: I am picking a fight that I may not fight at all as being a stay-at-home Dad all summer I won’t be blogging nearly as often.

I just saw The Curious Case of Benjamin Button last night, and was struck by the prominence of Heideggerian themes in it. I know a lot of students out there are hopped up on Heidegger — one of you should write a paper on the Heideggerian elements in the movie. Some of the themes I saw: the overall significance of time for Dasein (Button’s aging process as the reverse of everyone elses’s, and the questions it raised; the backward-running clock); technological enframement (contrast between the old nursing home and the newer hospital, buttons vs. zippers); importance of care (again, the feeling of the old nursing home, as well as the nuggets of wisdom Button learns along the way); finally, the great need for editing.