Mark D. White

Writer, editor, teacher

Category: Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture series

  • I just realized I never posted this call for abstracts for what is a long-overdue and much-needed book. My abstract is in, and if you're a philosopher who's also a Wonder Woman fan, you should submit one too. (The deadline is February 1!)   Call for Abstracts   Wonder Woman and Philosophy   Edited by…

  • As Zap2It reported early this morning, part of Grant Morrison's sprawling DC Comics series Multiversity will tell the story of a stranger from another planet landing in Nazi Germany rather than Smallville, Kansas: "Imagine you're Superman and for the first 25 [years] of your life you were working for Hitler," Morrison says, "And then you…

  • While preparing my nearly-monthly update to my personal blog, I noticed that Wiley has made my Superman and Philosophy chapter, "Moral Judgment: The Power That Makes Superman Human," available for free at its website. In this chapter, I explain how Superman's powers don't make him immune to the need to make difficult moral choices that…

  • It's been a long wait–for me, at least!–but the cover to Superman and Philosophy is finally available (and visible to your right). As I said on my personal blog after I first saw it, I love how it parallels the Batman and Philosophy cover in general layout and title font, since the two volumes bookend my…

  • At The Atlantic today, Hans Villarica interviews Dr. Roy Baumeister, one of the psychologists chiefly responsible for the ego-depletion or "muscle" theory of willpower. Under this conception, people have a limited amount of willpower at any given time; as they use it, it is depleted in the short term but strengthened in the long term (just like a muscle…

  • Ah, comics. The other day I was chatting about New Avengers #22 with with my friend Christine of the fantastic Daredevil blog The Other Murdock Papers. I mentioned how how out-of-character it seemed that Daredevil would exclaim "Toss her!" when the New Avengers are trying to extract information from Victoria Hand. (Remember that New Avengers scribe Brian…

  • Thanks to Mitters' tumblr, I discovered that there are three samples from The Avengers and Philosophy: Earth's Mightiest Thinkers available at Wiley's site for the book: the table of contents, the index (in case you're curious who's included in the book–I'm happy to say most everybody!), and best of all, the first chapter, written by yours…

  • Wiley just released their free Kindle book, Superheroes: The Best of Philosophy and Pop Culture, featuring one chapter from each of the superhero-themed books in the Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture series, including the forthcoming titles on Superman and the Avengers, as well as two new and exclusive chapters, written by yours truly, on Captain…

  • This is great: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal takes an extremely practical approach to the life of Superman, part of it resembling Mahesh Ananth and Ben Dixon's chapter titled "Should Bruce Wayne Have Become Batman?" from Batman and Philosophy: The Dark Knight of the Soul (questioning whether superheroics are the morally best use of Bruce Wayne's wealth and…

  • The interview I did with my co-editor Jane Dryden about Green Lantern and Philosophy: No Evil Shall Escape this Book just appeared at the Los Angeles Times' Hero Complex blog. (It also includes a shameless plug for another new book of mine, Kantian Ethics and Economics: Autonomy, Dignity, and Character.) Thanks to Jevon Phillips for…