Month: August 2015

• August 21, 2015

  A Defense of Boasting

  We now have a very low estimation of boasters. They are loud-mouthed, arrogant, sometimes self-deceiving, and, while boasting especially, very inconsiderate of others. Such a level of self-importance disgusts us, the non-boasters. We have the presumption that those who are properly confident have no need to speak of themselves, let alone to sing their own…
• August 17, 2015

  In Praise of Rashness

  In The Mysteries of Courage, the legal scholar William Ian Miller invites us to take a second look at rashness. Might rashness be worthy of praise, if only praise in halves? In the endnotes, Miller references Urmson’s essay on Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean. On this view, cowardice is identified with excessive caution or timidity, courage (the…
• August 12, 2015

  5 Puzzles About Courage

  In preparation for a fall course I am teaching at Kaos Pilots entitled “Time to Get Tough,” I am reading William Ian Miller’s interesting book The Mystery of Courage. In the “Introduction,” Miller writes, “The core of courage’s ancient tale is attack and defense against the Other, other men to be exact. The core is about the…
• August 3, 2015

  William James on “The Moral Equivalent of War”

  William James, a committed pacifist, lived through the Civil War and the Spanish-American War and died during the run-up to World War I. In an incredible essay, “The Moral Equivalent of War,” first delivered as a talk at Stanford and later published in 1910, the year of his death, James observes that though everyone would…