Year: 2012

• March 30, 2012

  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,…
• March 29, 2012

  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…
• March 28, 2012

  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…
• March 27, 2012

  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…
• March 26, 2012

  Is it possible to have a plan for life?

  Attention is the rarest and purest forms of generosity. –Simone Weil (the quote from Weil was brought to my attention by my friend Carolyn Veith) This past week, one new conversation partner told me, “I had a plan for my life and I didn’t stick to it. Now I feel awful.” Her assumption is that…