Month: November 2011
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Pete Worley of The Philosophy Foundation asks, ‘How many things are there?’
Yesterday, I had a nice chat with Peter Worley who’s Co-founder, with his wife Emma, of The Philosophy Foundation. According to their website, their aim is to “bring philosophy to schools and the wider community.” Over the past 10 years, they’ve been training philosophers and teachers in leading schoolchildren in the art of philosophical inquiry.…
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Gladwell’s 10,000 rule for success and Aristotle’s reply
So a wise guy goes up to Malcolm Gladwell and asks him, “Hey, bub, can you tell me how you get to Carnegie Hall?” Gladwell, seeing that the guy’s probably in his early 60s, doesn’t miss a beat: “Of course. From here, you just take the N/Q/R to 57th St. and then walk a block…
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On murmuring, alienation, and institutional failures
The philosopher David E. Cooper’s massive doorstop, World Religions: A Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), does have a leitmotiv. It is the “problem of ‘alienation’ or ‘estrangement.’” By these terms, they [Hegel and Marx] meant the sense which many human beings–all of them, perhaps, at times–have of being ‘strangers’, of not being ‘at home’, in…
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On good humor and good thinking
1 The story goes that Plato is giving a lecture in the Academy on the essence of man. “What is man?” he asks. His pupils listen intently. “Man,” he answers, “is a featherless biped.” It is these properties that, conjointly, distinguish us from the mere brutes. At which point, Diogenes of Sinope bursts into the…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 