Category: education
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Learning from Zen: Withdrawing from a way of thinking
‘Brushing off thoughts which arise is like washing off blood with blood. We remain impure because of being washed in blood….’ –Bankei, Diaho Shogen Kokushi Hogo, quoted in Alan Watts, The Way of Zen ‘The new DSM would have everything right were it to forget such words as ‘diagnose’ and ‘treat’.’ –Zen Master One learns from a…
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On not owning a couch
The best thing that fairly well-to-do parents can do today would be to refuse the temptation to buy their children their first couch. A few recent tweets tell something of the story about the American precariat: ‘Student Debt Slows Growth as Young Spend Less’ http://nyti.ms/10xd0uG (More news about status of American #precariat) ‘The Idled Young Americans’:…
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Benedict or Cicero? Field philosophy or the monastic?
Day 1. A philosopher is neither a teller nor an adviser. Day 2. What Dancy’s Late Late Show appearance has to say about the philosopher’s disappearance Day 3. ‘Living’ philosophy: Field philosophy Scholars of Aristotle have long been divided over the answer Aristotle gives to the question of how best to live. Much of the Nicomachean Ethics points in…
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‘Living’ philosophy (I): ‘Field philosophy’
If one were so inclined, one could write an alternative history of American philosophy. Chiefly, that history would recount, beginning with American pragmatists such as Dewey and William James, its rise during the period when serious magazines were still financially viable, reaching its high-water mark with such works as Walter Lippmann’s defense of natural law…
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What Dancy’s Late Late Show appearance has to say about the philosopher’s disappearance
On April 1, 2010, the professional philosopher Jonathan Dancy, who happens to be the father-in-law of Claire Danes, appeared on the Late Late Show to speak with Craig Ferguson about moral philosophy in general and about moral particularism more specifically. Let it be said from the first that I am quite sympathetic to Dancy’s view…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 