Category: education

• November 7, 2012

  To the country to be full-time cultivars of the spirit

  I now have the warm socks, the woolen ones; they came in the mail yesterday. I’m told the wood is stacked up in the shed, ready in case the power goes out. We’re supposed to pick up an axe (the old one looked a shame, even to a novice such as myself) as well as…
• November 6, 2012

  On abstention from voting

  What reasons might one have for not voting? Ineligibility: it could be that someone would like to vote but, for whatever reason, does not qualify as a voter. Physical incapacity: someone may want to vote but be unable to get to a voting booth or fill out his ballot, etc. Mental incapacity: one may be…
• November 5, 2012

  Recitation as dishonesty, improv as honesty

  My initial response to both talks was that both spoke in smooth tongues. Their words flowed freely and were put together grammatically. Their styles were pleasing to the ear even if their voices–hers especially: Nussbaum’s–were tinny. For a few minutes, I listened to his lecture on Neoplatonism and to hers–Nussbaum’s–on Not for Profit. Her impromptu opening…
• November 2, 2012

  A brief review of the cognitive theory of emotions

  From time to time, I return to Martha Nussbaum’s understanding of our emotional life as it is elaborated in her books The Therapy of Desire and Upheavals of Thought. I have had reason to do so again recently. Diana Fritz Cates (see her book review: “Conceiving Emotions: Martha Nussbaum’s Upheavals of Thought,” The Journal of Religious Ethics 31.2 (Summer, 2003),…
• October 31, 2012

  Prospective, hypothetical inquiry

  Most of the work in my philosophy practice is focused on making sense of what has happened to someone where this “making sense of what has happened” involves fitting this event into a conceptual framework. Elsewhere, I have called this ‘philosophical holism’–a part is only intelligible in relation to a whole–and the insight into how…