Month: January 2012

• January 19, 2012

  Stone Soup, mutual dependency, and a new economic order

  In “The Story of Stone Soup,” as Antonio Dias tells it, a wandering beggar comes upon a village. Hungry and tired, he goes to each door and is met with the same answer again and again. There is, he is told, not enough to go around, and the door, half-opened, is soon closed upon him.…
• January 18, 2012

  Being arrogant got me halfway…

  “To live an examined life is to make a self-portrait.” –Robert Nozick, The Examined Life Being arrogant got me halfway to where I am today. Becoming humble got me the rest of the way. Being humble put me onto a different way. But arrogance, strange to say, was a saving grace for a young boy…
• January 17, 2012

  Imagining 2 economic worlds: relative abundance and relative scarcity

  Let’s build a naturalistic account of a social order under the conditions, first, of abundance and, next, of scarcity. By a “naturalistic account,” I mean the most formal rendering conceivable of human activity based solely on the simplest principles of human life and on the most threadbare of “lived logics.” Below, points 1-4 are neutral…
• January 16, 2012

  Philosophical life as gift economy; or, how I learned to stop worrying and love the gift (A year in funding review)

  Preamble I’ve revised the Philosophical Counseling tab so as to reflect the changes in philosophical life. Over the year, I’ve been making revisions, but this one is the whole hog. Please have a look at it and tell me what you think. You can leave comments beneath this post or drop me a note via…
• January 14, 2012

  Most Americans are highly apologetic…

  Most Americans are highly apologetic. The few who aren’t are considered, by the campaigners for the apology, to be altogether too arrogant indeed. Yet, in most cases, the effusive may be as much in error as the abstainers, the apology failing to suit, pushing us further apart. The apology’s native soil is the infraction. If…