Category: education

• January 11, 2012

  On rites of passage and walkabouts

  I met Peter Barnett, an Australian in his 50s, through Paul Monk, a former intelligence officer in Australia and presently a consultant and polymath, to whom I had, some months back, sent a note of praise about one of his papers on cognitive biases, to which he had replied with thanks, and because of which…
• January 10, 2012

  On lived logic and speculative philosophy

  The Stoics enjoined their pupils to live according to nature. The dictum, in essence, says that metaphysics is the way of ethics. If my way of my life is not in harmony with the way of the world, then I shall be overcome with strife, believing either in the power of my will to crush…
• January 9, 2012

  On the life need of cuisine; or, how we forgot how to eat

  I went to a dinner party this past weekend in which a lovely woman told a story that, to me, read like an allegory of irony. It went something like this: she’s kneeling at her father’s casket, weeping. Behind her in the pews, just within earshot, a man says to the man next to him,…
• January 7, 2012

  ‘I pray to lay my limbs in the ground as one who gladdened his fellow-citizens’

  The following is an excerpt from Pindar’s Nemea Ode 8. Pindar (ca. 518-438 BC) was a lyrical poet living during the Archaic Age in ancient Greece. The extant odes, apparently representing only a small part of his oeuvre, commemorate the victories of athletes from the Olympian, Pythian, Ishmian, and Nemean Games. Apart from the high…
• January 6, 2012

  How to play the rousing game of ‘getting to know someone you’ve never met’

  Moves in the Game You’re in the middle of a game that has only 3 moves. No more, no less. Until it chances upon a catchier name, the game shall be called “getting to know someone you’ve never met.” The goal of the game? Quite simply, to have an encounter with an acquaintance. An encounter…