Month: April 2012

• April 23, 2012

  To be is to be touched

  I can remember the presentations that guest speakers used to give to us second- and third-graders. The subject was the distinction between “good” and “bad” touches. By my recollection, there would have been red slashes over pictures of “inappropriate” touches–a man’s hand, say, en route to a young woman’s crotch–and circles around “good” touches like…
• April 21, 2012

  ‘I can’t believe it’: Awakening to philosophical life

  Yesterday evening amid the falling coolness–yesterday only a week shy of the time we’d first met two months prior, yesterday also only one week before her 30th birthday, yesterday of the stern stalked tulips with their playful, velvety heads, yesterday therefore so close to death–we were walking out of the Conservancy Garden when she told…
• April 20, 2012

  ‘Their philosophy is for others; I need one for myself’

  In Interview 139, the soft-spoken gentlemen at Philosophy Bites finally got around to asking professional philosophers what it is they do with their time. What, they queried, is philosophy? Some said that philosophy is the analysis of our concepts. Others said that philosophy is the examination of the presuppositions underlying what we normally take for…
• April 19, 2012

  On my becoming cozily parochial

  I believe that the modern moral question concerning what one should do is off the mark, and I believe the ancient ethical question of how my life is to fare is apropos and wisely worded. I am getting settled with the thought that self-cultivation is what matters to me most such that I have become…
• April 18, 2012

  What a body can do

  In the past three decades, my body has changed its size and shape and look many times. There was my baseball body, my weight lifting body, my 10-year rock climbing body. There is my meditative running body. I have been blessed to always have a beautiful, lean body, regardless of exact size or shape. Above…