Category: education

• August 25, 2014

  A review of Chapter One of Sam Harris, Waking Up: Preliminary questions

  I recently read Chapter One of Sam Harris’s forthcoming book, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion and found myself thinking, ‘This may not end up being an excellent book, but for all that it is an important and prescient one.’ (You can read Chapter One here on his website.) Harris’s principal question, which goes unstated…
• August 15, 2014

  The Fall of the Warrior and the the Idea of the Noble

  In The Good Life and Sustaining Life: An Inquiry into Our Great Vexation (in progress), I write,  I have included the figure of the warrior in the schema but not without some reservations since I am not at all sure whether the heroic life is possible in modernity. Many societies have held the aristocrat-warrior in…
• August 7, 2014

  Philosophical Portraiture: Listening Intently and Considering Closely

  In Aleksandra’s most recently completed portrait, the subject is in the midst of a philosophical conversation. In the figure on the left, we see a man listening intently. He is either ready to hear another speak or, more likely, is in the middle of hearing someone make a claim. He is listening–but in what manner? Intently,…
• August 6, 2014

  The Good Life and Sustaining Life: An Inquiry into Our Great Vexation (An excerpt)

  Preface: Our Great Vexation There may be no greater vexation in our time than the question of how to make a living in a manner that accords with leading a good life. Laypersons may evade the question merely by closing their eyes and keeping their heads down; doing so involves the great effort of remaining…
• July 29, 2014

  The tragedy of the commons: Existential homelessness

  I have been discussing the three ways of making a living, one of which is concerned with using the property we have. One good test of my first maxim–using properly what you’ve got–would be the ‘tragedy of the commons.’ In a now famous paper, ‘The Tragedy of the Commons,’ which was originally published in Science in 1968,…