Year: 2012

• October 16, 2012

  40-somethings, the Last Man, and a tragic sense

  I found Simon Kuper’s “Fortysomethings: A Midterm Report” (Financial Times, October 12, 2012) especially illuminating. He writes that 40-somethings are both producers and products of sheer busyness: they are mid-career, married, with young children and mortgage payments. He observes that they do not have time to think about their lives. Consequently, “Nowhere in my peer…
• October 8, 2012

  On Hadot’s ‘third way’ of doing philosophy

  I read an essay by Pierre Hadot’s main translator Michael Chase about philosophy as a way of life (PWL). In “Observations on Pierre Hadot’s Conception of Philosophy as a Way of Life,” Chase proposes that PWL could be a ‘third way’ of doing philosophy that is neither analytic nor Continental. In my experience (which chimes, I would…
• October 5, 2012

  The career in review: Why bother?

  Changing Conceptions of Work This week I’ve been exploring our received understanding of the career. I’ve reflected some on what makes it desirable and on what’s the matter with desiring it. Philosophical considerations aside, the historical truth is that unemployment rates among young persons living in the developed world are astronomically high. Reporting on the…
• October 4, 2012

  On career respectability as a cover for shame

  Perhaps the strongest reason why people speak so often, at such great length, and with such perturbations and agita about the desire to have a career is that they wish to appear respectable in the eyes of others. It is not as if they wanted their lives to be flourishing; it is rather the case…
• October 3, 2012

  Why a career has to founder: Hegel’s causality of fate

  I’d like to tease out what is desirable about careers–that they are well-paid work, that they carry a sense of continuity, and that they are regarded as respectable–but first I’d like to consider how the conception of the career founders, leading many into strife. I’m keen to tell the story. In order to have a…