Month: October 2012

• October 24, 2012

  Unstucking ‘stuckness’ (2)

  Stuckness Yesterday I argued that “stuckness” is the best single word description of the ‘place’ in which many people find themselves. Specifically, I said that being stuck involves 1. being unable to go forward toward a future state of being; 2. being unable to go backward, to return to a prior state of being; 3. having the desire to move one…
• October 23, 2012

  Unstucking ‘stuckness’ (1)

  Near the end of our conversation yesterday, John Thackara, co-founder of Doors of Perception, used the word “stuck.” So had a man in Switzerland, students at Kaos Pilots, a woman in Berkeley… For nearly two years, “being stuck” or “feeling stuck” may be the phrase I hear most often to describe an individual’s or an…
• October 22, 2012

  On eating properly and ‘two kinds of quantity’

  I don’t believe that calories–this unit of measure–is a good way of talking about food in general, of talking about ‘how much’ I need to eat or how I go about conceptualizing what it is I eat. My doubts about ‘the calorie’ are born of my wholesale rejection of what goes under the header of…
• October 20, 2012

  Cavell on the skeptical moment

  Excerpt from Stanley Cavell, “The Philosopher in American Life,” In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. * I came to the idea that philosophy’s task was not so much to defeat the skeptical argument as to preserve it, as though the philosophical profit of the argument…
• October 19, 2012

  Philosophy as metanoetics

  Excerpt from Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, trans. Takeuchi Yoshinori, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. * [L]ife consists of the continuous practice of “death-and-resurrection.” Metanoesis is practicing, and also being made to practice, this “death-and-resurrection” according to criteria of the value and meaning of our existence, or, more correctly, of the valuelessness and meaninglessness of…