18May 2018 by Roman Pașca No Comments

Philosophy lunches with students

Education
I'm so excited! Today, I just got the final version of the poster for the philosophy lunches I will be doing with my students, and I think the Media Center at the university did a really god job with the design. It's finally happening! I actually came up with the idea for these "philosophy lunches" about half a year ago, but it was the middle of the semester so I decided it would be better to wait for the new academic year. In the mean time, I thought a lot about the format (they were not "lunches" in the beginning), about the texts we would read (Japanese? Western? modern? premodern?), about the topics we would discuss, about how to initiate and moderate the discussions,  etc. etc. etc. My idea was…
Read More
15May 2018 by Roman Pașca No Comments

Sympathies and symphonies

Education
One of the courses I have been teaching for the last couple of years at KUIS is a Creative Writing class - to be more specific, "Creative Thinking, Living and Writing". I was in class the other day, with my students - they were working in groups on creating the plot for a fairy tale. (One of the things we do is to tell different stories in different formats, from fairy tales to manga.) I was walking around the room, observing the interactions within the groups, giving a piece of advice here and there and trying not to interfere too much with the whole process. The task was to take the characters they had created during the previous class, integrate them within the story while at the same time thinking…
Read More
31Jan 2018 by Roman Pașca No Comments

The future is bleak

Education
Finally, Romania has a new government. It's actually the third one since the coalition between PSD (Social Democratic Party) and their junior partner ALDE (Alliance of Liberals and Democrats) came into power in December 2016, which is very telling as to the (in)stability of the country's political system. I will just note that both governments so far, even though initially supported by the ruling coalition, were actually ousted when the leaders of the two parties realized that the prime minister's actions had veered away from their own personal agenda. An agenda which prioritizes, for instance, a so-called "reform" of the justice system which would make it almost impossible for corruption cases to make it to court, as well as an increasingly anti-European discourse in which institutions like the European Parliament…
Read More
25Oct 2017 by Roman Pașca No Comments

Shouldn’t we talk about this?

Education
Yesterday, I read an article about how Cambridge University students got trigger warnings related to the content of some the works they were supposed to read and discuss in class. Apparently, one of the persons in charge of the English lectures flagged any session containing material that could be deemed "upsetting" with a red triangle and an exclamation mark - including Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, among others. (The full article is here, on the BBC website.) I read Titus Andronicus a long time ago and my memory is a bit fuzzy - I do remember some sexual violence in the play, but it's about so much more than that. Power, control, politics, intrigues, plots... so much more. And even if it were about sexual violence, shouldn't we talk about this? Isn't that…
Read More