Month: March 2012
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A philosophical guide to surviving the transition from an old way of life to a new one
The following post is written especially for my conversation partners who are now living through a transition. We know that your old way of life has gone under but you’re not yet able to walk into a new way of life. You know I’m concerned that you’re despairing, concerned that you’ll infer that because this way…
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In praise of stuttering
I have become suspicious of eloquence. My suspicion reminds me of two very different stories. Thomas Aquinas is in the chapel, celebrating the feast of St. Nicholas, when he experiences what appears to him as a mystical vision. Formerly a voluminous writer and prodigious scholar and presently at work on his magnum opus, the Summa Theologica,…
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On the suicide’s claims and the philosopher’s replies
I want to consider the question of suicide and I think a good place to begin is with a quote from the French writer Albert Camus. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus writes, “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts…
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On holding converse with myself and on taking proper care of myself
I have been holding two thoughts in mind for quite a while and I now think it’s high time to bring them together. The first thought appears in Book VI of Diogenes Laertius’s The Lives of Eminent Philosophers. Diogenes Laertius relates that “When he [one philosopher named Antisthenes] was asked what advantage had accrued to him…
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On putting life in order
My article on philosophical practice, “Counselling: Putting Lives in Order,” can now be viewed at The Philosophers’ Magazine website. It appears, appropriately and ironically, in TPM 57, “Philosophy’s Empty Ideas,” after Alain de Botton’s essay on secularists’ need for religion and before Julian Baggini’s interview with Patricia Churchland, a proponent of eliminative materialism. It’s nice…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 
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