Category: education

• November 1, 2011

  The hardness and the softness of philosophical practice

  “Whitman’s central image, the leaves of grass, a form of life that perishes but rises again and again out of its own decay” (231). –Lewis Hyde, The Gift “Anything I have I bestow.” –Walt Whitman, Song of Myself There is a hardness as well as a softness to the philosophical life. Like leaves of grass,…
• October 31, 2011

  On invitations to have philosophical conversations, disciplines of eating, smallholding farming, and much more on Pindar and St. Benedict

  In the spirit of giving, I’d like to invite you to have a philosophical conversation with me. Let’s call it philosophical conversation as gift giving. I’ve been meeting a lot of people this way in the past couple weeks. My strolling card is filling up, but let’s see if we can make it work. What’s…
• October 29, 2011

  Burning Man: Spiritual experience, gift exchange, & primal ritual

  I ask again what we’re to make of spiritual experience in the early 21st C. and I hear again more first answers. And I think again of the place of gift exchange in this new order of being. And I read again about Burning Man–how strange, how primal, how elemental, how transient. Simone Ubaldi explores…
• October 28, 2011

  Friday meditation: On gift giving, potlatches, and the modern world

  The Gift Exchange I think it was last week when I had a conversation with John Mitchinson of Unbound books. I write “I think it was last week” because I’m starting to run all my conversations together, and my days have started to lose their hard edges. Near the end of my conversation with John,…
• October 27, 2011

  A critique of CBT – Part 2

  Kantian Critique as Just Generosity Kant’s conception of critique is meant to give us an accurate assessment of the instrument under investigation: of its proper uses, overuses, and misuses. There is a generosity of spirit in showing a pupil how something is to be used as well as in admonishing her for using it in ways…