Category: education

• February 29, 2012

  ‘Therefore, I tried the hammer…’: On how not to receive a gift

  The impetus for the following letter was a guffaw. Last week I ordered a copy of Hubert Dreyfus’s Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time and, by mistake, had had it shipped to my conversation partner’s residence.  Here: a non-gift for you! Thanks! In his turn, he had mailed the book to me. On Monday,…
• February 28, 2012

  Gift economy explained, justified, and defended

  Gift Economy Explained 1. Suppose A gives B a gift wholeheartedly. (By “wholeheartedly,” I mean without reserve or hesitation, without holding back or misgivings. Positively, I mean: “giving forth freely or receiving plentifully.”) 2. Then B receives the gift wholeheartedly. 3. It follows that B is goodly indebted to A. The debt is lighter, not…
• February 27, 2012

  On a good friend being a good introducer

  One of my friends, Dougald Hine, told me once that a good friend is someone who senses when to introduce who to whom. (I take him to be talking about action, not about grammatical constructions.) Let’s parse this statement. First of all, an introduction is not a recommendation, i.e., not a “should” statement, but a…
• February 25, 2012

  Now think fast!: Brief reflections on the making of ‘Despatches from the Invisible Revolution’

  The very idea of the book is undergoing a paradigm shift before our eyes. For the life of me, I can’t tell exactly what a book is, what it is supposed to do, how it is meant to loop into or out of our cultural moment, or what purpose it will likely serve in the…
• February 21, 2012

  On changes to the MCAT and on what makes a good doctor good

  On Friday, one of the headlines in The Chronicle of Higher Education caught my eye: “Medical-Admissions Test to Look More Broadly at Who Will Be a Good Doctor.” The article states that, as of 2015, the MCAT, the nation-wide exam that is administered to students who hope to attend medical school, will be making some significant…