Category: education
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Unstucking ‘stuckness’ (1)
Near the end of our conversation yesterday, John Thackara, co-founder of Doors of Perception, used the word “stuck.” So had a man in Switzerland, students at Kaos Pilots, a woman in Berkeley… For nearly two years, “being stuck” or “feeling stuck” may be the phrase I hear most often to describe an individual’s or an…
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On eating properly and ‘two kinds of quantity’
I don’t believe that calories–this unit of measure–is a good way of talking about food in general, of talking about ‘how much’ I need to eat or how I go about conceptualizing what it is I eat. My doubts about ‘the calorie’ are born of my wholesale rejection of what goes under the header of…
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Cavell on the skeptical moment
Excerpt from Stanley Cavell, “The Philosopher in American Life,” In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. * I came to the idea that philosophy’s task was not so much to defeat the skeptical argument as to preserve it, as though the philosophical profit of the argument…
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Philosophy as metanoetics
Excerpt from Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, trans. Takeuchi Yoshinori, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. * [L]ife consists of the continuous practice of “death-and-resurrection.” Metanoesis is practicing, and also being made to practice, this “death-and-resurrection” according to criteria of the value and meaning of our existence, or, more correctly, of the valuelessness and meaninglessness of…
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40-somethings, the Last Man, and a tragic sense
I found Simon Kuper’s “Fortysomethings: A Midterm Report” (Financial Times, October 12, 2012) especially illuminating. He writes that 40-somethings are both producers and products of sheer busyness: they are mid-career, married, with young children and mortgage payments. He observes that they do not have time to think about their lives. Consequently, “Nowhere in my peer…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 