Category: education
-
To be free of mad love: philosophy as a way of life
In the darkness of night madness has seized Our glorious Ajax: he is ruined and lost. –Tecmessa from Sophocles’s Ajax — “I want to get rid of my feelings, to be free of this mad love.” In its essence, philosophy is not a tool but a practice. It is a practice in right thinking and…
-
On Geoff Dyer’s unsatisfactory philosophy of life – Part 2
You can read Part 1 here. — If the question is whether Dyer is a great stylist, then answer is unequivocally yes. If it is whether he is a brilliant comic writer, the answer is also yes. However, if the question is whether he–that is, the Dyer of his writings, the persona contained therein–is a…
-
On Geoff Dyer’s unsatisfactory philosophy of life – Part 1
The Nature of Desire A desire is born. That desire seeks something other than itself: namely, the object of desire. Because the desire does not have what it wants, it lacks. It lacks and aims to possess. An organism is a desiring being. Because it is not self-sufficient, because not everything is already within it,…
-
Dougald Hine on the UK riots
At New Public Thinking, my friend Dougald writes with great insight about the UK riots. For example, The genuinely radical response to something like #riotcleanup is not to knock it down, but to broaden out the story, to take it deeper. Rather than abuse people for their desire to take positive action and to make…
-
On a ‘very different’ St. Benedict for our time
Let us read the final paragraph of Alasdair MacIntyre’s radiant book together: It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 