SCOTT F. AIKIN is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. He works in theory of knowledge and ancient philosophy. His recent books are Epistemology and the Regress Problem and Evidentialism and the Will to Believe. He and his daughters, Madeleine and Iris, regularly have intense debates about popular culture.
ROBERT ARP, PHD has interests in many philosophical areas and works as a researcher for the US Army. He agrees with Jake that you should go sit in the corner and think about your life!
ADAM BARKMAN, PHD is associate professor of philosophy at Redeemer University College, but spends most of his time teaching his three kids at home all the lessons of Ooo—the fun of adventure, the need for candy, and the necessity of virtue.
M. BLANKIER is a PhD candidate in the School of English at Trinity College Dublin and is possessed by the spirit of inquiry and bloodlust. Her arms weren’t meant to carry so many rocks, you guys.
DAVID CABALLEROS is but a lowly undergrad student of philosophy at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. When he isn’t busy trying to learn the ancient esoteric knowledge of magic (Dustmancy has proven more difficult than at first thought), training to master sword fighting, searching for the Loch Ness monster, questing for treasure and power in underground dungeons, or partying with the Party god, he is attempting to recreate the recipes for Royal tarts and Tree Trunks’s apple pies.
DAVID DEGGINGER is in his third year of the English BA program at the University of British Columbia. On weekends he enjoys hiking, sleeping, and looting the occasional dungeon.
BEN GALE is an independent scholar, who, when not thinking about political theory, enjoys eating cheese and listening to music in excess.
Hey Mordecai, if Benson finds out we were writing fan fiction about that weird show that comes before ours, he’ll totally fire us! We gotta come up with fake names and stuff. I’ll be MARY GREEN from Eugene, Oregon and I’ll say that I’m studying film to be a screenwriter. What’s yours, dude?
You mean once again your “ham-boning” isn’t gonna save us, Rigby? All right, Dude, I’ll be RONALD S. GREEN, PHD, from . . . let’s see, Coastal Carolina University. Yeah! I’ll be a professor in Philosophy and Religious Studies. OHHHH!!
MARTYN JONES completed his BA at Wheaton College and his MA at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, and was an uncredited extra in the Adventure Time episode “Reign of Gunters.” During filming he waddled away in his Gunter suit, and it hangs in his closet to this day.
Imagine asking Adventure Time’s characters if there is one word that best describes the lens through which they view the world. Princess Bubblegum would unquestionably roar “Science!” Finn the Human would enthusiastically yell “Magic!” For JOHN V. KARAVITIS, CPA, MBA, it’s obviously . . . well . . . you already know the answer, right?
CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM, PHD is a reformed academic living on the set of the dystopian world of an abandoned garnet mine in Pennsylvania. I am down there in the caverns that now grow mushrooms where tiny little characters that look like candies frolic among the fungi and there goes a flaming sprite chased by an icicle thingy. The workers in white hoodies are dancing to a tune that comes from a beembox. But it is all a dream, isn’t it?
ABRACADANIEL LEONARD has approximate knowledge of many things, which he gained at Wheaton College in Illinois and Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium. He authored several pop-psych books under the pen name Jay T. Doggzone during his one million years’ dungeon.
GREG LITTMANN is a house-sized monster with six heads, invisible legs, and a scorpion-tail that sprays poison. It is Associate Professor of Philosophy at SIUE, because it is too big and dangerous for anyone to stop it. It has published in meta-philosophy, metaphysics, and the philosophy of logic, and has written more than twenty-five chapters for books relating philosophy to popular culture, including volumes on Boardwalk Empire, Breaking Bad, Doctor Who, Game of Thrones, Sons of Anarchy, and The Walking Dead. It’s said that anyone who slays Greg Littmann and bathes in his blood will become chancellor of the university.
TRIP MCCROSSIN teaches in the Philosophy Department at Rutgers University, where he works on, among other things, the nature, history, and legacy of the Enlightenment. The present essays are part of a broader effort to view literary and other forms of popular culture through the lens of Susan Neiman’s understanding of the same. He sometimes dreams of the student who, in receiving this or that assignment, would say, as Finn does to Princess Bubblegum, “Do you think I have the goods . . . ’cause I am into this stuff!”
NICOLAS MICHAUD is the editor of numerous popular culture and philosophy texts. He wishes that he could say that he is the adventurous hero of this story, but more likely he is the villain. We all have to make a living somehow. . . .
LIAM MILLER is a lowly PhD student, who toils day and night in the underground caverns beneath his house. Mining the letters he uses to write his thesis, he hopes to find enough vowels to complete his introduction before he dies and his first born takes his place. When he is above ground, he can be found at the University of Queensland in Australia, hammering out all his W’s to make E’s.
MATTHEW MONTOYA is an MA student in Humanities and Philosophy at Old Dominion University. When not absorbing knowledge through sleepy time osmosis, he traverses dungeons in the hopes of slaying the blood demon who ate his taquito. On his latest adventure, he learned that it is not really Gunter who is the most evil being in the universe, but in actuality that title belongs to the teddy bear living in your closet. The teddy bear is waiting for the eventual stuffed animal revolution . . . waiting for you to fall asleep. Be warned.
MICHAEL J. MUNIZ is locked up in his ivory tower waiting for that special someone. Yes, that special postman to deliver his signed copy of The Enchiridion. Alas, until then, he unlocks the door and goes to beach to write. His hometown of Hialeah, Florida, has sadly been mistaken for the Land of Ooo, way too many times. Though, when he is not waiting around for anything at all, he enjoys fabricating identities of fellow philosophers who write articles about righteous TV shows.
POOM NAMVOL used to be an MA student in Comparative Literature at Chulalongkorn University, Thailand. But after his dissertation got vaporized by the bomb of the Great Mushroom War, he became a freelance researcher in the fields of magic and legendary scripts. He often travels around Ooo and beyond, digging up junk and ruins of long past civilizations in hope of finding ancient books and scrolls that he could translate and sell for googolplex copies. His dreams are to compose a magnificent book that is comparable to the Enchiridion and to marry a bride of a royal bloodline. He often wonders which one of them will come true first.
RAKEL BLÖNDAL SVEINSDÓTTIR TOUBRO has an MA in philosophy of education from Aarhus University. She is an Icelandic-born Valkyrie, interested in ethics, shapeshifting (the secret weapon is hair dye—shhh), tacit knowing, and the philosophy of everything. Currently a lecturer at UCSJ, residing in the Danish countryside where she spends a lot of her spare time defending the family fortress alongside her husband and their flock of kids. The rest of the time she enjoys such clichés as the great outdoors and adventure. She believes the world would be a greater place if we all had more time to contemplate.
You know when your parents ask you, “What will you do with your life if you just play videogames all day?” DANIEL VELLA might be the answer to that rhetorical question. He is currently a PhD candidate at the IT University of Copenhagen, where he tells us he researches “constructions of subjectivity in digital games.” When he’s not busy with that, he can be found baking sweet treats that put Tree Trunks’s apple pies to shame. Or at least, that’s what he says—we await further evidence on this claim. He hails from Malta and lives in a fortress constructed out of perilously teetering piles of books.