Category: ethics

• June 3, 2014

  Cheerfulness, tightrope walking, and an amorous rendezvous

  To draw the character of the cheerfully ready person more vividly, I return to Nietzsche’s description of the tightrope walker and the ‘worthy gentleman.’ In one aphorism, Nietzsche distinguishes between non-tightrope walking and tightrope walking situations: ‘To get into only those situations in which illusory virtues are of no use, but in which, like the tightrope-walker…
• June 2, 2014

  Cheerful readiness: A proper response to being surprised

  I will be heading to Banff in about a week. I will not know the participants; I will not know what we will do exactly; I will not know what will happen; I will have never worked with my friend Ian nor taught before with another person. I know only that it will be a…
• May 29, 2014

  Minding: An overview

  Let me sum up what I have written about our mental lives over the past 10 odd posts. Recall the thesis with which I disagree: Because the human mind, like the human body, tends to be sickly and ill, it seeks healing or cures. I have argued all of the following: 1.) There is a disanalogy between…
• May 28, 2014

  How self-knowledge is possible

  I pick up where I left off in the last post. Recall, first of all, that the picture of the mind as a some ‘place’ or ‘substance’ that contains important things (ideas, faculties, images, conceptions) deep within me is a mistaken picture of minding. Recall, second of all, that the question which springs from the picture of the mind…
• May 26, 2014

  How self-knowledge became necessary yet impossible

  The idea that the mind is a substance-like thing or an executive set of functions (a dashboard of sorts) residing in the head will lead to perplexities. I have already held that the mind is not ‘substance-like,’ that it does not reside in the head, that it does not contain a suite of activities, and that it…