Author: Andrew Taggart

• February 20, 2011

  What is the role of the public philosopher in the case of Madison, Wisconsin?

  I don’t know what’s going on, and I don’t know why it’s happening. I don’t understand. I’m not Naomi Klein, and I’m not Scott Walker. I want to be honest: I’m confused. Why am I confused? Not because I haven’t read the news, watched video, or poured over commentary. Not for lack of trying or…
• February 19, 2011

  Robyn Creswell on Egypt

  In his n+1 article entitled “On Egypt,” Robyn Creswell provides a lucid bird’s-eye-view account of the political unrest in Egypt. Creswell sheds light in particular on Egyptians’ alienation from political life stemming from the early 1970s.
• February 19, 2011

  McEwan’s Solar: A philosophical review

  Ian McEwan’s most recent novel Solar (2010) picks up where his last novel Saturday (2005) left off. (His 2008 work, On Chesil Beach, is a novella. It is also one of his best.) In Saturday, McEwan poses the political question: Can an open society resist the threat posed by 21st C. terrorism? The question can be…
• February 17, 2011

  On integrity

  Notes Integrity (Latin: integritas) connotes a sense of wholeness, of all parts coming together beautifully and completely. And the lack of integrity? That is nothing but the feeling of coming undone, of being out-of-joint and self-divided. In “Integrity and Wholeness,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 27.1 (2010), John Cottingham writes that someone who has a “certain psychological wholeness”…
• February 17, 2011

  Ataraxia, allostasis, or resilience?

  Ian McEwan’s fiction circles around the question: After an event has transformed my being in the world, what do I do now? How do I reorient myself to the world, to this new world from which I am estranged? His novels are novels of “adjustment” or “collapse.” Suppose we’re aware of the tragic nature of…