Month: November 2011
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Roberto Unger on ‘the future of the left’
A breathtaking interview with Roberto Unger, “The Future of the Left,” The European (October 24, 2011) about the need to think differently. My curating below. (If you grant Unger’s conclusions, then you’ll have to also grant how truly “paradigm-shifting” his ideas are.) — Rethinking Modern Institutions “My view is that all the fundamental problems of the European…
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Friday meditation: On the alchemy of reconceptualization
Fine phrase this. So what’s this (he consults his piece of paper) ‘alchemy of reconceptualization,’ as you call it? It’s an ongoing process of making sense of one’s life. It involves surveying the parts of your past and transforming the self. Bear in mind that it’s not a one-off, and yet there are rest stops…
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Reflections on the past 2 years of post-academic life
It had been almost two years since I’d re-read my paper, “Whither Moral Education?,” and what struck me only yesterday was the tone. The style of the piece caught my ear like a thief in the night. I could hear, as I hadn’t been able to before, a tinny shrillness, a crankiness, a forlornness. What…
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Whither moral education?
Abstract “In “Whither Moral Education?,” (World and I, November 2011), I argue that American education has for far too long set aside the questions of the good and the meaningful–or, what is the same thing, the moral and intellectual virtues. First I attempt to identify what factors gave rise to this phenomenon and then in the final pages to explore how…
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The hardness and the softness of philosophical practice
“Whitman’s central image, the leaves of grass, a form of life that perishes but rises again and again out of its own decay” (231). –Lewis Hyde, The Gift “Anything I have I bestow.” –Walt Whitman, Song of Myself There is a hardness as well as a softness to the philosophical life. Like leaves of grass,…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 