Category: education

• January 4, 2014

  Love, friendship, and work

  In Sources of the Self, the philosopher Charles Taylor argues that what is distinctive about the modern world is that many of us have come to regard the claims of ordinary life as being ultimately fulfilling. Someone’s falling in love, raising a family, maintaing a close-knit group of friends, and doing meaningful work would, on this…
• January 1, 2014

  Skyping ‘without a body’

  Quaestio 1: What is living discourse? 1.) ‘Philosophical Death.’ There is no face-to-face, only the voice-to-voice. As Socrates makes plain when he converses with his friends in Phaedo, philosophizing is an ‘impersonal’ activity. It occurs not in the personal (evidenced in the face or ‘in the body’) but in the trans-personal (which is possible through…
• December 31, 2013

  Skyping blindfolded

  Yesterday, I advanced the counterintuitive thesis that my philosophical friends and I are better off having philosophical conversations over Skype than we would be were we to have philosophical conversations in person. I promised that I would prove why this thesis is nonetheless true and, in so doing, that I would show how Skype can serve as…
• December 30, 2013

  Skyping as living discourse

  All of my philosophical conversations are held over Skype, and my philosophical friends (formerly called conversation partners) and I are the better for it. The claim that ‘we are the better for it’ is counterintuitive, yet it turns out to be true. The object of these posts will be to establish both why this is…
• December 17, 2013

  The second aspect of reality revisited

  I am thinking of radiance, thinking radiantly. So far, I have argued that reality consists of beings (finitude), being (totality), and non-being (infinity). I wish to revisit totality today. Before, I claimed that the feature we perceive in totality is wholeness. In terms of ethics, we would want our souls to be as whole as…