Category: education
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Can one lead a life of the mind in a post-patronage society?
Update: You can also read snippets of this 4-part series over at Inside Higher Ed. — This is Part 1 of a 4-part series on leading the life of the mind outside the academy. In Part 1, I examined 3 models for living well. In Part 2, I discussed what we need to do in order to change our…
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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…
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Ian Brunskill on Montaigne’s art of living
Ian Brunskill has written a fine review (“For a Little Room Behind the Shop” [American Interest, March/April 2011]) of Sarah Bakewell’s book on Montaigne, How to Live. Near the end of the review, he writes that Montaigne’s was “a productively detached kind of engagement with life.” Montaigne’s outlook, Brunskill concludes, is a “counterpoint to a media-driven, mediated modern culture…
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On the ‘repeal of reticence’
Rochelle Gurstein’s thoughts about the “repeal of reticence” have been swimming around in my head for months now. How could it be that we have become accustomed to sharing all our thoughts, desires, wishes, and fantasies with total strangers? And how did it come about that exposing the private lives of political figures could be…
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Walter Russell Mead on The Art of War as a manual for living in the modern world
In his American Interest blog entitled “Sun Tzu: The Enemy of the Bureaucratic Mind,” Walter Russell Mead provides an eloquent, prescient exposition of Sun Tzu’s seminal work. Near the end of the essay he writes, “The Art of War is a handbook for living in an uncertain and dangerous world.” Throughout, he stresses–rightly, in my opinion–that…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 