Author: Andrew Taggart
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All the present alone
1 I believe that, for him [Plotinus], if philosophical life in fact prepares one for an eventual mystical experience, this philosophical life has value in itself. All things considered, Plotinus’ mystical experiences were extremely rare. Poryphyry [Plotinus’s student] tells us that the rest of the time–that is, almost all the time–he tried “to be present…
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‘What was most essential for us could not be expressed’
In this remarkable excerpt from the opening pages of The Present Alone is Our Happiness: Conversations with Jeannie Carlier and Arnold I. Davidson, translated by Marc Djaballah, Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2009, 5-7, Pierre Hadot speaks about the boyhood mystical experiences that led him, many years later, to embrace philosophical inquiry. “What was most essential for us,”…
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On the art of longing for a radiant way of being
The truth of metaphysics is revealed in the question, “Can this [way of life] be all?” (Adorno, Negative Dialectics). My longing is a longing for another way of life beyond the one I inhabit. The truth of the perdurance of the soul is that of a being that leaves behind one way of life but…
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‘I spilled the ink across the page’: Reflections on inquiring about life
Preface I spend a lot of my time trying out novel experiments, watching them unwind, and then puzzling through what I can learn about their reasons for unraveling. (Mine, a life in letters spelling out failures. All spilled ink across the page.) I worked at two start-ups, have run my own businesses, have conjured up…
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On Dark Mountain Project, having skin in the game, and staking oneself
In early February, I had a conversation with Jeppe Graugaard, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of East Anglia. The topic of the conversation, which also happens to be the subject of Jeppe’s dissertation, was the Dark Mountain Project, a poetically inspired fellowship that came into being when Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine wrote a…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 
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