Month: October 2014

• October 31, 2014

  Self-ignorance, friendship, and love

  We are all ignorant of some things some of the time inasmuch as we do not know of the properties of some things, the existence of some things, a certain range of facts, etc. In most cases, our ignorance about something or other is not pernicious. That is not true, however, of our ignorance about what we claim to…
• October 28, 2014

  The Big Question and Self-surrender

  It is unavoidable that the Big Question will come and, in the beginning, churn you into it like an obsession that is not one. No grand event need have precipitated it, nothing excitable have incited or occasioned it, no divorce, no infanticide, no screaming war have blighted one’s face or picked clean one’s fields. Horrors you may never…
• October 27, 2014

  Letting others be: A fictitious admonition

  No words must needs be addressed to him if what he is doing does not accord with what I think he would be better off doing. Let him be. That there may be other ways of doing something, some incontrovertibly or demonstrably better than this one he prefers or seems to anyway: what of it, man? Am I…
• October 24, 2014

  Stumbling Blocks in the Active Life

  Suppose we begin with the person who has renounced four prominent pursuits: the idea of leading a comfortable life (bourgeois), that of leading a pleasurable life (hedonism), that of doing whatever he feels like whenever he feels like doing it (the wastrel), and the idea that there is no sufficient reason for living (nihilism). It may be out of a…
• October 23, 2014

  Vagueness and Inaccuracy: The Case of ‘Making a Difference’

  Vagueness and Inaccuracy I am intrigued by how the philosophical problems of vagueness and inaccuracy are played out in laypersons’ experiences of everyday life, particularly in the lives of those pursuing the active life. Vagueness pertains to two different sets of issues while inaccuracy, at least of the kind I’m often presented with and especially concerned…