Month: February 2011
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McEwan’s Solar: A philosophical review
Ian McEwan’s most recent novel Solar (2010) picks up where his last novel Saturday (2005) left off. (His 2008 work, On Chesil Beach, is a novella. It is also one of his best.) In Saturday, McEwan poses the political question: Can an open society resist the threat posed by 21st C. terrorism? The question can be…
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On integrity
Notes Integrity (Latin: integritas) connotes a sense of wholeness, of all parts coming together beautifully and completely. And the lack of integrity? That is nothing but the feeling of coming undone, of being out-of-joint and self-divided. In “Integrity and Wholeness,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 27.1 (2010), John Cottingham writes that someone who has a “certain psychological wholeness”…
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Ataraxia, allostasis, or resilience?
Ian McEwan’s fiction circles around the question: After an event has transformed my being in the world, what do I do now? How do I reorient myself to the world, to this new world from which I am estranged? His novels are novels of “adjustment” or “collapse.” Suppose we’re aware of the tragic nature of…
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Clifford Saron on the positive effects associated with intensive meditative practice
Last night I attended a talk given by Clifford Saron, Ph.D., an Associate Research Scientist at UC-Davis’s Center for Mind and Brain. The title of the talk was “Training the mind: A longitudinal investigation of intensive meditation, attention, emotion, and physiology.” Saron and his team of researchers have been studying the effects of deep contemplative practice…
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Can I be happy as the world burns?
I’m not sure what the question means. If it means, “Can I be happy even as the planet ceases to be a domicile for homo sapiens,” then the answer is clearly no. It is difficult to fathom what conception of happiness would allow for the extinction of life–my life included. (That is, provided that we limit…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 