Category: education

• June 5, 2014

  Testing whether someone is cheerfully ready to inquire with me

  When I want to determine whether someone is cheerfully ready to inquire with me, I ask him five questions. Each question is to be assented to wholeheartedly. 1.) Can you let yourself be led? This question helps to rule out the skeptic, the insincere person, and the coward. How so? The skeptic wants to begin…
• June 3, 2014

  Cheerfulness, tightrope walking, and an amorous rendezvous

  To draw the character of the cheerfully ready person more vividly, I return to Nietzsche’s description of the tightrope walker and the ‘worthy gentleman.’ In one aphorism, Nietzsche distinguishes between non-tightrope walking and tightrope walking situations: ‘To get into only those situations in which illusory virtues are of no use, but in which, like the tightrope-walker…
• June 2, 2014

  Cheerful readiness: A proper response to being surprised

  I will be heading to Banff in about a week. I will not know the participants; I will not know what we will do exactly; I will not know what will happen; I will have never worked with my friend Ian nor taught before with another person. I know only that it will be a…
• May 29, 2014

  Minding: An overview

  Let me sum up what I have written about our mental lives over the past 10 odd posts. Recall the thesis with which I disagree: Because the human mind, like the human body, tends to be sickly and ill, it seeks healing or cures. I have argued all of the following: 1.) There is a disanalogy between…
• May 28, 2014

  How self-knowledge is possible

  I pick up where I left off in the last post. Recall, first of all, that the picture of the mind as a some ‘place’ or ‘substance’ that contains important things (ideas, faculties, images, conceptions) deep within me is a mistaken picture of minding. Recall, second of all, that the question which springs from the picture of the mind…