Sasha L. Biro

An important part of the work of an introductory philosophy class is learning how to read philosophy. The digital annotation platform Perusall can be useful in both F2F learning environments as well as in virtual learning environments, as it helps students learn how to read philosophy. While the traditional online learning environment relies heavily on the discussion forum to replicate the F2F learning experience, digital annotation is a valuable alternative for promoting student engagement with course material. This paper will describe the platform as well as how to use Perusall to facilitate student participation and close reading of texts.

An important part of the work of an introductory philosophy class is learning how to read philosophy. The digital annotation platform Perusall can be useful in both F2F learning environments as well as in virtual learning environments, as it helps students learn how to read philosophy. While the traditional online learning environment relies heavily on the discussion forum to replicate the F2F learning experience, digital annotation is a valuable alternative for promoting student engagement with course material. This paper will describe the platform as well as how to use Perusall to facilitate student participation and close reading of texts.

Through myths that pattern and repeat we figure the world to ourselves. The desire to be done with myth, to surpass mythic thinking in favor of a “more” rational way of thinking, is but one way of perpetrating violence in the guise of similitude. The rejection of muthos by logos is itself a form of violence, with significant ramifications. The following analysis will explore the work of Luce Irigaray’s Speculum of the Other Woman, and Jean-Luc Nancy’s Inoperative Community, focusing on the ways in which myth becomes mythology, and the inescapable question of violence that attends this operation. This paper, although touching upon the matter, is not an attempt to answer the larger question of what myth is. The scope of this analysis is constrained to a discussion of both Nancy and Irigaray’s understanding of myth as foundational, as well as interrogating the nature of the violence of representation. I will briefly touch upon the long and elaborate conversation surrounding the muthos–logos divide.

Levinas's project throughout Totality and Infinity and in his earlier works Existence and Existents and Time and the Other is to situate the primacy of the ethical as foundational first philosophy. For Levinas, myth is intimately connected to being, the being before reflection and thought. The entering into reflection and thought Levinas terms transcendence, the epoché, or first ethical gesture. In order to situate his ethics, Levinas turns to the Cartesian notion of infinity: the idea of infinity as an overflowing presence, the container capable of containing more than it can draw from itself, from its own being.1 This idea of infinity is grounded in an experience of the Other as primal.2 The presence of a face...