As a member of the Cultural Engagement Council at MSU, I've been thinking about how we might create a more coherent and integrated arts and cultural experience for students at the university. Drawing on my…
“On Touch and Life in the De Anima.” In Phenomenology and the Metaphysics of Sight, edited by Antonio Cimino and Pavlos Kontos, (Leiden: Brill Academic Publisher, 2015, 69-94). Although Aristotle is often thought to give…
Continuing my experiment in public writing along the way, this post on Medium outlines the contours of what I've been thinking about as "catalytic opportunities." Catalytic Opportunities I’ve begun thinking about strategic initiatives as catalytic.…
This post on Medium initiates an experiment in public writing designed to facilitate transparency and refine my thinking in relation to issues I face in my role as Dean of the College of Arts and…
Last week was the first week of the fall semester at Michigan State. It was my first opportunity to welcome new students to campus as Dean of the College of Arts & Letters. In order…
The places we inhabit habituate us. The virtues they cultivate are grounded in the values they embody. In 1855, a natural opening in the oak forest of the Burr farm was selected as a fitting…
As I begin my tenure as Dean of the College of Arts and Letters at Michigan State University I find myself thinking of these lines adapted from Deuteronomy 6:10-12 by Peter Raible: "We build on…
The fog had receded when Danielle, Anne Marie, and Lisa moved out onto the back porch of the Inn at the Presidio to continue writing. I could hear their heated conversation unfolding below my second…
We held the first Public Philosophy Journal Writing Workshop at the Inn at the Presidio this to facilitate the work of five collaborative projects. On episode 73 of the Digital Dialogue, each collaborative writing team joins me…
It is probably fair to say that Will Altman and I met one another in my book Socratic and Platonic Political Philosophy. Perhaps it is strange to think of a book as a place in…
With the announcement that I would be recommended as Dean of the College of Arts and Letters at Michigan State, Val, the girls, and I entered a liminal space. I have long be drawn to the…
My friend and colleague, Rick Lee (@rickleephilos), asked me to speak with his graduate teaching seminar at DePaul University about using technology to teach philosophy. Rick and I have a long history of conversations extending…
By committing to take a picture of something beautiful I encountered in my life each day, I sought to see differently, to cultivate what might be called the habits of a quotidian aesthetics.
The liberal arts have always given us powerful ways to study and understand the world we inhabit. The events in Ferguson call for a liberal arts approach because they are multidimensional. They require us to…
By the summer of 1954, the students at Penn State had grown impatient. The world had settled into a Cold War, the nuclear arms race threatened total annihilation, and the students felt unprepared to address…
“Who Let the Dogs Out? Tracking the Philosophical Life Among the Wolves and Dogs of Plato’s Republic.” In Plato’s Animals: Gadflies, Snakes, Stingrays, Swans, and Other Philosophical Beasts, edited by Jeremy Bell and Michael Naas,…
At the beginning of the Physics, Aristotle captures something of the essence of the liberal arts and sciences as an endeavor. This path from the surface of things to a deeper understanding of their nature…
At Bucknell's Digital Scholarship Conference last fall, Zeynep Tufekci made a compelling case for public academic writing. Her keynote address, Researching Out Loud: Public Scholarship as a Process of Publishing Before and After Publishing, argued…
I was asked to facilitate a discussion about productivity and administration with my Associate Dean colleagues on the Academic Council for Undergraduate Education (ACUE) at Penn State. Being something of a productivity geek, I jumped…
In the winter of 1988, during my freshman year at Wittenberg University, I took Professor Warren Copeland’s Introduction to Ethics: Racism course. This course and its sister, Advanced Ethics: Racism, which I took the following…
Here is the press release we wrote for the second Public Philosophy Journal grant from the Mellon Foundation: Penn State has been awarded $549,000 by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for an additional two years…
There is nothing more fun to teach than Plato's dialogues. Whether they love him or hate him, the figure of Socrates Plato draws in his dialogues move students to think more deeply about their relationships…
For three of the past four years (2011, 2013, 2014), I have posted one picture each day of something beautiful I encounter. The impetus behind the project was to cultivate an attentiveness to the beauty…
@cplong: Advocacy for Open Access in the humanities is gaining momentum. I myself have committed to reviewing articles for Open Access journals and am working with colleagues to develop a new model of open access…
The print edition of my book, Socratic and Platonic Political Philosophy: Practicing a Politics of Reading, has been ready since May, but I asked Cambridge to hold back its release until they completed development of…
In this interactive keynote address for the Bucknell Digital Scholarship Conference: Collaborating Digitally, I articulate a model of collaborative scholarship in Philosophy that has enabled me to bring undergraduate students and a wider community of…
In episode 71 we are joined by John Jasso, Assistant Professor of English at Penn State. Our conversation focuses on what Jasso calls Plato’s Psychagogic Rhetoric, a phrase that suggests the manner in which Plato…
The Public Philosophy Journal project has been animated from the beginning by the attempt to cultivate excellent habits of scholarly communication in a digital age. To do so will require finding ways to develop thick…
Philosophy has always been a public activity, although its relationship with the public and its own public nature have long been fraught with anxiety for philosophy and the public both. At this year’s Society for…
Recently I was asked by the editors of a journal whose mission and scholarship I support and respect to review a book by a scholar I very much admire. In the past, I would have…
Richard Lee, Jr., Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University, joins Chris Long for episode 70 of the Digital Dialogue to talk about the teaching and philosophy of Richard Bernstein. Rick and I were students of…
Among its many affordances, Twitter can be a powerful public note taking tool. At the end of a rich and exhausting conference celebrating the work and teaching of Richard J. Bernstein, I used Twitter to…
To honor the work of Richard J. Bernstein, a group of colleagues and former students will gather at Stony Brook University for a conference entitled, Thinking the Plural: Richard J. Bernstein's Contribution to American Philosophy.…
Today we embark upon an exciting new phase of the General Education reform process at Penn State. After more than a year of conversations and discussion, we are now in a position to engage in…
Without diminishing the centrality of the PhD research endeavor, how can we cultivate more engaged graduate students? This presentation situates the graduate research endeavor in its wider institutional and public context and suggests two concrete…
Without diminishing the centrality of the PhD research endeavor, how can we cultivate more engaged graduate students? This presentation situates the graduate research endeavor in its wider institutional and public context and suggests two concrete…
This presentation argues that there is a difference, and a similarity, between the ways Socrates and Plato practice politics. Socratic politics, as depicted in Plato's dialogues, may be characterized as the practice of using spoken…
Whatever else can be said of the PhD endeavor, it is fraught with anxiety and self-doubt. Everyone associated with graduate education knows this, many of us from first-hand experience, but rarely do we discuss it,…
It was paragraph three, section b) of the Contributor Publishing Agreement from Indiana University Press that gave me pause. In it I read that I would not be permitted to post the final published version…
In this poster session, we present the project of the Public Philosophy Journal and our plans for cultivating a community of engaged scholars to sustain it. At the session, we explain our motivations for designing…
To honor the work of Richard Bernstein and specifically his influence as a teacher at the New School for Social Research, Marcia Morgan and Jonathan Pickle invited a group of his former students to write…
One of the main affordances of the emergence of digital modes of scholarship in the humanities is the manner in which they have opened the question anew about the relationship between the content of humanities…
Fifty-nine years ago today, on June 9, 1955, President Dwight Eisenhower addressed the centennial graduating class of Penn State, where his brother, Milton, was president of the university. Two things were on the President's mind…
In his own essay on Kant's "What is Enlightenment?," Foucault ascribes to Baudelaire a modern attitude that captures well the spirit of Kant's public essay on enlightenment. For Baudelaire, according to Foucault, modernity is "an…
As a discipline, philosophy is struggling to come to terms with the public affordances of social media. This is a bit surprising given that Socrates himself never shied away from publicly engaging those he encountered…
At the Penn State General Education Spring 2014 retreat, we decided to begin anew with GenEd as we try to find ways to feasibly adopt a curriculum that would be animated by substantive integrative learning…
In his famous 1784 essay, What is Enlightenment?, Kant identifies the activity of enlightenment with a certain way of being public. This post considers that essay as a performance of public philosophy, arguing that in…
From time to time, I am called upon in my role as Associate Dean to welcome academic groups to campus. This afternoon, I had the opportunity to say a few words of welcome to philoSOPHIA:…
This drawing from Mathew Paris (1217-1259), made famous more recently by Derrida's disquisition on it in The Postcard, appears in a 13th century manuscript that contains a series of fortune-telling tracts. Now, with the generous…
The Information Technology unit at Penn State holds IT Matters breakfasts a few times a year. This semester I joined colleagues on stage to talk about my work and how it intersects with IT at…
We at Penn State are engaged in an intense, ongoing and, in my view, very healthy dialogue about General Education reform. In order to integrate the research endeavor into the undergraduate experience, we ought to…
Today is the Day of Digital Humanities 2014, an open community publication project designed to document digital humanities practices around the world. Throughout the day I will be posting content related to various facets of…
Graduate students are often confronted with conflicting advice about how much of their academic work they should share publicly online. Although there are good reasons to consider carefully what one shares and how, graduate students…
To be published or to be read, that is the question scholars increasingly face. Although publications with reputable university presses or journals continue to be the cornerstone of the tenure and promotion process, many remain…
In this interactive keynote address to the Pennsylvania Circle of Ancient Philosophy hosted by Villanova University, I argue that the Phaedo is Plato's most eloquent political dialogue. We tweeted the keynote and the entire PCAP…
With the spring release of Socratic and Platonic Political Philosophy: Practicing a Politics of Reading, we are working hard to create the infrastructure for the online discussion the enhanced digital book will be designed to…
Aristotle’s thinking is peripatetic. It moves along paths, some of which are well-worn, others newly cleared by the creative elasticity of his thinking. It pursues questions by traversing along a course for a stretch, on…
This experiment in academic public writing began with a compliment. In a Twitter conversation with @ProfessMoravec, I came across her Rationale for Academic Writing in Public in which she discusses how and why she has…
The Chronicle of Higher Education recently published an article Susan Welch and I wrote about the data the College has collected since 1996 on the placement of our graduate students in the social sciences and…
One of the values we hope to integrate into the new General Education curriculum at Penn State is the recognition of the importance of public deliberation. Deliberating in public is difficult; it requires certain intellectual…
“The Peripatetic Method: Walking with Woodbridge, Thinking with Aristotle.” In The Bloomsbury Companion to Aristotle, edited by Claudia Baracchi, (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014). Published in The Bloomsbury Companion to Aristotle (Bloomsbury Companions), this essay, entitled…
Marina McCoy, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Boston College, joins me for episode 69 in which we discuss Plato and the philosophical imagination. Marina is a long time guest of the Digital Dialogue, appearing previously…
Now that Socratic and Platonic Political Philosophy: Practicing a Politics of Reading is in galley proofs, the contours of the enhanced digital book are beginning to take shape. In order to determine the features of…
As the year comes to a close, so too does my 365 in 2013 picture a day project. The purpose of the project was to cultivate habits of mindfulness. Each day I set myself the…
This presentation on the Public Philosophy Journal, invited by the APA Committee on Public Philosophy, provides an update on the status of the development of the open access, open peer review journal. However difficult it…
If you are, as I am, in the habit of live-tweeting your own lectures using Keynote and the Applescript Keynote Tweet 2.5, originally created by Toby Harris and subsequently updated by @cogdog, you will need…
Excitement abounds here in the Long household as preparations are made for the arrival of Santa. At 9- and 8-years old, the girls are at that prime age when Christmas is long anticipated and full…
It was dark before I got around to shoveling the walkway. The girls were excited to be outside, but I had a chore to complete. They wanted to go sledding, so they started down the…
As we sought to map out the design and functionality of the PPJ with colleagues at Matrix a few weeks ago, we began to suggest how a disciplinary economy of an open peer review might be navigated…
During our first planning trip to Matrix at Michigan State to develop the Public Philosophy Journal, Mark Fisher and I sat down to talk with Ethan Watrall and Bill Hart-Davidson about creating the journal as…
There seems to be widespread skepticism that peer review without anonymity can be both rigorous and fair. This post thinks through the dynamics of an open peer review process and suggests that both rigor and…
Moya Bailey is a post-doctoral fellow at the Africana Research Center here at Penn State. She received her doctorate from Emory University in 2013 with a dissertation entitled “Training to Treat: A Study of Representation…
I have always sought to integrate my philosophical commitments into my administrative life. So, when Noëlle McAfee came to campus to deliver a paper entitled, "Deliberation and the Affective Dimensions of Public Will-formation," I found…
This summer two colleagues, Marina McCoy and Adriel Trott, asked me if I had a short video about my use of technology as a professor of philosophy. At the time, I didn't. But their requests…
By the time we took the stage as the final panel of the day, we had heard the voices of expert educators, faculty, administrators, employers and alums speak about the value and importance of general…
Almost immediately upon being awarded a $236K Mellon Grant to develop the Public Philosophy Journal, Mark Fisher, Dean Rehberger and I found ourselves in New York at the 2013 Ithaka Sustainable Scholarship conference to learn…
With the announcement that Mellon has funded the first year of the Public Philosophy Journal, I have been thinking more reflectively on what it means to do public scholarship. Receiving the grant is, however, only…
On Friday, October 4th, we received the good news that the Mellon Foundation's Scholarly Communications and Information Technology program will provide $236K to support the development of the Public Philosophy Journal (PPJ, aka @PubPhilJ). The grant marks the end of…
The Public Philosophy Journal, an innovative open access, open peer review online publication in philosophy, has received a one-year, $236,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The grant will support the development of the…
In 1914 Harlan Smith published an article about how best to incorporate sound into museum exhibitions to supplement the visual experiences of museum goers. According to Craig Eley, Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Institute for Arts…
As a graduate student in the digital age, you need a domain of your own. First of all, you will be Googled, and when you are, your domain should appear early in the results as…
John Lysaker, Professor of Philosophy at Emory University, joins me to discuss his current book project on philosophical writing. In it, John investigates various forms of philosophical writing, developing what he calls a "descriptive phenomenology…
The Emory Center for Digital Scholarship asked me to give a version of the presentation at gave at #DH2013 last summer entitled eBook as Ecosystem of Digital Scholarship Socratic and Platonic Political Philosophy: Practicing the…
Returning to Wittenberg for the first time since graduating in 1991, I gave an interactive, live-tweeted, lecture on Reading the Death of Socrates. The paper argues that the Phaedo is Plato's most eloquent political dialogue,…
Last year, there was some controversy over the question of live-tweeting at academic conferences and in academic settings more generally. The hashtag that emerged then, on Twitter of course, was #Twittergate. In this post, I…
On the day he was to die, we find Socrates writing poetry. This is very strange because Socrates generally chose not to write, opting instead to engage in dialogue with those he encountered in and…
It is going to happen. Maybe not today or this week, but eventually, you will be Googled. I am not talking about being Googled by an old friend interested in what you might be up…
The rhythm of the academic year returns us again to the beginning. State College is charged with energy as parents drop off their children, some for the first time, and students turn and return to…
They will tell you it is too dangerous, that you'll say something stupid and never be hired. They'll say it is too fast, too superficial, too full of snark to be of any value to…
New affordances in dynamic modes of digital scholarly communication have enabled authors to tailor the content of our texts to the forms in which they appear in public. This presentation focuses on two performative publication…
In April 2010, I began blogging about closing the digital research circle. The iPad had just been released and I had just moved from Endnote to Zotero to take advantage of its ability to share…
The CBO is Cambridge Books Online, the electronic books platform for Cambridge University Press (CUP). This is the platform into which Mike Chaplin and a team of programmers working for CUP will build the Socratic and…
As my book, Socratic and Platonic Political Philosophy: Practicing a Politics of Reading, goes officially into editorial production on the print side of Cambridge University Press, I have started to work with Mike Chaplin on…
Rebecca Goldner, recent PhD from Villanova University, joined the Digital Dialogue for episode 63 on Touch in Aristotle. This was our first recorded Digital Dialogue using Google+ On Air, and we were able to stream…
Last week humanities scholars from around the world descended upon Lincoln, Nebraska for DH2013, the annual international conference of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations. It was my first time at the DH conference and…
Lee Skallerup Bessette and Jarah Moesch join the Digital Dialogue for episode 62 at the 2013 Digital Humanities Conference in Lincoln, Nebraska. Lee, who tweets as @readywriting and writes the College Ready Writing blog for…
Socratic and Platonic Political Philosophy: Practicing the Politics of Reading (forthcoming Cambridge University Press) is an enhanced digital book that attempts to use digital media technology to cultivate the political practice of collaborative reading for…
New affordances in dynamic modes of digital scholarly communication have enabled authors to tailor the content of our texts to the forms in which they appear in public. The diversity of ways it is now…
I began blogging in earnest shortly after my arrival at Penn State in 2004, but it was not until June 2007 that I created this blog, the Long Road, to reflect on my experiences share…