Christopher Long

Civic Life The Long Road

The Politics of Hate

Today as the Republicans of South Carolina again go to the polls, I am returned to those critical days in the Republican primary in 2000 when Karl Rove deployed a strategy of hate and fear…

Christopher LongJanuary 19, 2008

Technology The Long Road

iPod Touch Ups

Last October I wrote with some frustration about the limitations of my iPod Touch, three months later, it is perhaps fair to revisit the list of issues I had with the device to see what…

Christopher LongJanuary 17, 2008

Civic Life The Long Road

The Poetics of Politics

Last year on the anniversary of hurricane Katrina I wrote about Martin Luther King and the content of our Nation's character. In that post, I embedded a YouTube video of about Barack Obama because I…

Christopher LongJanuary 4, 2008

Civic Life The Long Road

I have always thought Obama's background as a community organizer would help his chances in Iowa. A few hours time will tell if this intuition was right. However, this article, entitled "A Tiny Iowa Paper…

Christopher LongJanuary 3, 2008

Living The Long Road

No Monsters

Lately, we have had a monster problem in our house. Chloe has been very concerned about monsters, particularly the possibility that one or more live in one of her closets. Checking the closets before bed…

Christopher LongDecember 30, 2007

Education The Long Road

Blogging in the Philosophy Classroom

One of the many great privileges of teaching here at Penn State is the opportunity I have to work closely with faculty and staff committed to thinking creatively about teaching and learning. One place where…

Christopher LongDecember 23, 2007

Living The Long Road

Phil & Sophia

Two boxes of old slides had been sitting in my closet for years. My mother gave them to me long ago with the thought that maybe we might look at them sometime. Over Thanksgiving this…

Christopher LongDecember 15, 2007

Technology The Long Road

Web 3.0

After hearing the Education Technology Services (ETS) Talk, number 35 in which issues were raised about the limits of Facebook and other aspects of Web 2.0 social networking that were feeling a bit cumbersome, I…

Christopher LongDecember 13, 2007

Civic Life The Long Road

The Reach of Campaign Rhetoric

With the campaigns for the US Presidency fully underway, the attack ads are really heating up. The intense rhetoric seems to have filtered down into the heart of at least one long standing battle in…

Christopher LongDecember 10, 2007

Living The Long Road

The Dazzle of the Light

Upon passing a cemetery on the way to play group yesterday, Chloe was prompted to a line of questioning that led to the question of death: not only her death but also the death of…

Christopher LongDecember 4, 2007

LwCH The Long Road

Life with Chloe and Hannah 02 – Playing with Dolls

Here is another episode of Life with Chloe and Hannah (LwCH). It is a relatively short recording of the girls playing a typical game with their dolls, putting them to sleep and waking up again.…

Christopher LongNovember 20, 2007

Presentation: Academic Presentations Vita

SAAP 2008 Presentation

My paper on Woodbridge's reading of Aristotle entitled "The Natural History of the Soul" has been accepted for the 2008 meeting of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy. The paper is part of…

Christopher LongNovember 18, 2007

Articles Book Chapter Vita

Plato's Method in Madness

Long, Christopher P. "Is there Method in this Madness? Context, Play and Laughter in Plato's Symposium and Republic." In Philosophy in Dialogue: Plato's Many Devices, edited by Gary Alan Scott. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,…

Christopher LongNovember 11, 2007

Living The Long Road

Hannah's 2nd Birthday

Today Hannah Aveline Long turns two years old! To celebrate I have added one of my favorite pictures of her with a new umbrella she received for her birthday.This year we celebrate with visits first…

Christopher LongNovember 11, 2007

LwCH The Long Road

Life with Chloe and Hannah 01 – Early Snow

I have posted Life with Chloe and Hannah, episode 01 below. It is the first of what I hope to be an ongoing collection of podcasts that capture something of the daily life of my…

Christopher LongNovember 9, 2007

Civic Life The Long Road

Fiscal Responsibility: Pay for Educational Excellence

In the Centre Daily Times today (after 11/4, link requires subscription), I noticed a central theme that appears in the answers the State College Vision slate of candidates gave to the question: What would your…

Christopher LongNovember 4, 2007

Civic Life The Long Road

Save Our Schools (SOS)

The write-in campaign of James Leous and Robert Hendrickson have produced three short, funny YouTube advertisements that highlight some of the differences between their positions and those of the State College Vision slate of candidates.…

Christopher LongOctober 29, 2007

Civic Life The Long Road

Write-In Leous and Hendrickson

The upcoming School Board election in State College seems to mark an important turning point for our schools. As someone with two young daughters who will enter the district in the next three or four…

Christopher LongOctober 24, 2007

Clytemnestra Hesitates before Killing the Sleeping Agamemnon by Pierre Narcisse Guérin

Articles Publication: Journal Vita

The Daughters of Metis

"The Daughters of Metis: Patriarchal Dominion and the Politics of the Between." The Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, 28, 2 (2007). By attending closely to three ancient stories concerned with the origin and effect of patriarchal…

Christopher LongOctober 22, 2007

Education The Long Road

Penn State Atheist, Agnostic Association

Nat Jackson and David Yanofsky have taken it upon themselves to reactivate the Penn State Atheist, Agnostic Association that was started two years ago by Richard Jeffery, a former philosophy major here at Penn State.…

Christopher LongOctober 3, 2007

Technology The Long Road

My New iPod Touch

I received my new iPod Touch the other day and have had a few days to play with it. On the whole, I would say that it is very close to being one of the…

Christopher LongOctober 1, 2007

Articles Publication: Journal Vita

Nous and Logos in Aristotle

"Nous and Logos in Aristotle." Freiburger Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Theologie 54, 3 (2007): 348-367; co-authored with Richard A. Lee, Jr. This essay challenges the received orthodoxy that in Aristotle, nous, the capacity for intuitive…

Christopher LongSeptember 11, 2007

Living The Long Road

Gifts of Nature from my Daughters

There is a leaf in my book bag. I found it when I was standing in front of my class of first-year students, taking out my computer and books, preparing to teach. It brought me…

Christopher LongSeptember 10, 2007

Civic Life The Long Road

Don't be fooled again

Today is Labor Day and there is short quiet before the storm of debate in Washington about the war in Iraq unleashes itself upon us. General Petraeus will give his assessment later in the month.…

Christopher LongSeptember 3, 2007

Civic Life The Long Road

The Content of Our Character

Martin Luther King dreamed that one day people would be judged "not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." If you listen to that speech again, it is difficult…

Christopher LongAugust 29, 2007

Academic The Long Road

Richard Rorty

This year witnessed the death of Richard Rorty, an important American philosopher and good friend to my own teacher, Richard Bernstein. I embed here a YouTube clip posted by my colleague at Penn State, Phillip…

Christopher LongAugust 24, 2007

Living The Long Road

Rhythms of Fall

In the distance is the sound of drums and horns. The high school band has begun to practice again behind the football field where young men run and tackle, drilling for the new season. The…

Christopher LongAugust 21, 2007

Living The Long Road

The Farms of Centre County

The Pennsylvania Association of Sustainable Agriculture (PASA) sponsored its second annual Centre County farm tour today. My family, along with our neighbors, the Erickson's (with whom we share a summer share at the Village Acres…

Christopher LongAugust 11, 2007

Civic Life The Long Road

Congress in Fear

Last week I wondered whether Congress would have the courage to pursue the question of impeachment. This week we received the unequivocal answer: no. In fact, not only will the Congress not pursue the national…

Christopher LongAugust 8, 2007

Civic Life The Long Road

A "National Inquest"

In the Federalist Papers #65, Alexander Hamilton articulates the "true spirit" of the institution of impeachment written into the constitution. Article II, section 4 of the United States Constitution, puts the question of impeachment in…

Christopher LongAugust 1, 2007

Living The Long Road

Passing Moments

AVALON, NJ - This is a place of liminal passages: the pines give way to dunes, the dunes to sea, the sea to the horizon and an openness of possibility. The elements too pass into…

Christopher LongJuly 21, 2007

Living The Long Road

Imitation and the Power of Story

In the Poetics, Aristotle says: To imitate is co-natural to human-beings from childhood and in this they differ from other animals because they are the most imitative and produce their first acts of understanding by…

Christopher LongJuly 12, 2007

Technology The Long Road

Teaching with Google Tools

I am beginning to think about the significance of RSS feeds and how they might be used in teaching. Google has a number of tools of potential importance for teaching. For example, the Google Reader…

Christopher LongJuly 3, 2007

Civic Life The Long Road

Jocasta and the Lieutenant General

In the June 25, 2007 edition of the New Yorker, Seymour Hersh reports on the report General Taguba filed chronicling the "systematic and illegal abuse" of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison and its initial…

Christopher LongJune 25, 2007

Living The Long Road

Community Supported Agriculture

Last weekend my family participated in the annual Strawberry festival at the Village Acres Farm, where we are members of their community supported agriculture (CSA) program. As you can see, the strawberries were beautiful, and…

Christopher LongJune 18, 2007

Book Reviews Vita

The Descent of Socrates

I wrote a review of The Descent of Socrates: Self-knowledge and Cryptic Nature in the Platonic Dialogues, by Peter A. Warnek (Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006) in The Continental Philosophy Review, (forthcoming).

Christopher LongJune 17, 2007

Announcement The Long Road

About the Long Road

The title of this web log is more than a play on the name of its author. It refers specifically to Socrates' insistence in the Republic (at 435d and 503c-d) that the path to truth,…

Christopher LongJune 10, 2007

Articles Publication: Journal Vita

Aristotle’s Phenomenology of Form

Long, Christopher P. "Aristotle's Phenomenology of Form: The Shape of Beings that Become," Epoché 11, no. 2 (2007), 435-448. Scholars often assume that Aristotle uses the terms morphē and eidos interchangeably. Translators of Aristotle's works…

Christopher LongMay 28, 2007

Marsyas teaches young Olympus playing the flute Painting by Pyotr Vasilyevich Basin

Articles Publication: Journal Vita

The Politics of Music

Long, Christopher P. "Socrates and the Politics of Music: Preludes of the Republic," Polis 24, no. 1 (2007). At least since the appearance of Aristotle's Politics, Plato's Republic has been read as arguing for a…

Christopher LongMarch 10, 2007

Articles Publication: Journal Vita

Saving the Things Said

Long, Christopher P. "Saving ta legomena: Aristotle and the History of Philosophy," The Review of Metaphysics 60 (2006): 247-267. By taking seriously the extent to which Aristotle understands the things said (ta legemona) by his…

Christopher LongMay 11, 2006

Books Vita

The Ethics of Ontology

In 2004 my book, The Ethics of Ontology: Rethinking an Aristotelian Legacy, was published by the State University of New York Press. A novel rereading of the relationship between ethics and ontology in Aristotle. Concerned…

Christopher LongMay 11, 2004

Book Reviews Vita

Does Socrates Have a Method?

I wrote a review of Does Socrates Have a Method? Rethinking the Elenchus in Plato’s Dialogues and Beyond, edited by Gary Alan Scott (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press) inn The Review of Metaphysics,…

Christopher LongMay 11, 2004

Articles Publication: Journal Vita

Between the Universal and the Singular in Aristotle

This essay attempts to uncover the ideology of form that operates in an unquestioned way in much philological scholarship concerning Aristotle's thinking. Drawing on four different interpretations of form in Aristotle, that of Joseph Owens,…

Christopher LongDecember 1, 2003

Articles Publication: Journal Vita

Dancing Naked with Socrates

Long, Christopher P. "Dancing Naked with Socrates: Pericles, Aspasia and Socrates at Play with Politics, Rhetoric and Philosophy," Ancient Philosophy 23, 1 (2003): 49-69. This article offers an interpretation of Plato's Menexenus in which the…

Christopher LongNovember 11, 2003

Articles Publication: Journal Vita

The Ethical Culmination of Aristotle’s Metaphysics

Long, Christopher P. "The Ethical Culmination of Aristotle's Metaphysics," Epoché 8, 1 (Fall 2003): 121-140. This article takes up the rather bold philosophical suggestion that Aristotle’s Metaphysics culminates not in the purity of God’s self-thinking…

Christopher LongJuly 4, 2003

Articles Publication: Journal Vita

Totalizing Identities

Long, Christopher P. "Totalizing Identities: The Ambiguous Legacy of Aristotle and Hegel after Auschwitz," Philosophy and Social Criticism 29, 2 (2003): 213-244. The Holocaust throws the study of the history of philosophy into crisis. Critiques…

Christopher LongMay 28, 2003

Articles Publication: Journal Vita

The Ontological Reappropriation of Phronesis

Long, Christopher P. "The Ontological Reappropriation of Phronesis," Continental Philosophy Review 35, 1 (2002): 35-60. Ontology has been traditionally guided by sophia, a form of knowledge directed toward that which is eternal, permanent, necessary. This…

Christopher LongMarch 10, 2002

Articles Publication: Journal Vita

The Rhetoric of Spinoza

Long, Christopher P. "The Rhetoric of the Geometrical Method: Spinoza's Double Strategy," Philosophy and Rhetoric 34, 4 (2001). Rather than adopting an uncritical conception of the geometrical method as optimal due to its inherent objectivity,…

Christopher LongJuly 4, 2001

Articles Publication: Journal Vita

Between Reification and Mystification

Lee, Richard A. and Christopher P. Long "Between Reification and Mystification: Rethinking the Economy of Principles," Telos 120 (2001): 92-112. While the rhetoric of the “end of metaphysics” is guided by a well-founded concern to…

Christopher LongMay 28, 2001

Book Reviews Vita

Contemporary Portrayals of Auschwitz

I wrote a review of Contemporary Portrayals of Auschwitz: Philosophical Challenges, edited by Rosenberg, Alan, James Watson and Detlef Linke (Amherst, New York: Humanity Books, 2000) in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 15, 1 (2001):…

Christopher LongMay 28, 2001

Articles Publication: Journal Vita

Art's Fateful Hour

Long, Christopher P. "Art's Fateful Hour: Benjamin, Heidegger, Art and Politics," New German Critique 83 (2001): 89-115. In 1935 Walter Benjamin wrote that “art’s fateful hour has struck” and that he had “captured its signature”…

Christopher LongMarch 10, 2001

Articles Publication: Journal Vita

The Hegemony of Form and the Resistance of Matter

Long, Christopher P. “The Hegemony of Form and the Resistance of Matter,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 21, 2 (1999): 21-46. This article offers an interpretation of the transition that occurs in Physics A.7, in which…

Christopher LongMay 28, 1999

Articles Book Chapter Vita

Imagination/Einbildungskraft

Long, Christopher P. "Imagination/Einbildungskraft," Enzyklopädie Philosophie, ed., Sandkühler, Hans Jörg, (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1999). This is an article I wrote for an encyclopedia in Germany that traces the meaning of the imagination through the…

Christopher LongMay 28, 1999

White flower growing out of a fissure in a cement lot

Articles Publication: Journal Vita

Arendt on the Family

Long, Christopher P. "A Fissure in the Distinction: Hannah Arendt, The Family and the Public/Private Dichotomy," Philosophy and Social Criticism 24, 5 (1998): 85-104. By way of an analysis of Arendt’s defense of the public/private…

Christopher LongNovember 27, 1998

Articles Publication: Journal Vita

The Understanding and Imagination in Kant

Long, Christopher P. "Two Powers, One Ability: The Understanding and Imagination in Kant's Critical Philosophy," The Southern Journal of Philosophy XXXVI, 2 (1998): 233-253. In order to suggest why Kant does not offer an explicit…

Christopher LongMarch 10, 1998

Articles Publication: Journal Vita

Reluctant Transcendence

Long, Christopher P. "Reluctant Transcendence: The Face to Face in Levinas's Totality and Infinity, Conference 5, 1 (1994): 19-34. By investigating Levinas’ notion of the transcendence of the face to face against the backdrop of…

Christopher LongFebruary 14, 1994

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