Category: ethics
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A felicitous realization about recurrence and impermanence
Final days in Appalachia. A felicitous realization. So long as we live, each day will recur, varying only slightly from the last. We will work and rest, eat and sleep, think and speak. We will incline or be supine; sit down or get up; touch or be touched; be around others or be alone. As…
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Talitha Stevenson’s ‘Mind field’: A synoptic review of DSM-5
‘Mind Field,’ a short review published in the Financial Times on May 24, 2013, seems to me the most succinct, insightful review of Diagnostic Statistical Manual-5 to date. In well under 1000 words, Talitha Stevenson points out the limitations of DSM. My summary of her points runs as follows: 1. That the DSM seeks to make a firm, clean distinction…
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Who are the teachers of virtue and inquiry?
‘If virtue can be taught,’ Socrates asks time and time again, ‘then who are the teachers of virtue?’ Yesterday I argued: 1. If we are living through unsettled time, it follows that inquiring is the most important genre of discourse. 2. We are living through unsettled time. 3. So, inquiring is the most important genre.…
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‘I don’t know… Let’s find out.’
Earlier this week, one conversation partner asked me to give him a better account of the art of inquiry. I replied that a certain genre of discourse would arise and would be suitable for a certain age. Panegyric and encomia would arise during, and be suitable for, a heroic age, since the poet’s job would…
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Can what really matters pass the test of being a joke?
‘How do you know that what you’re making–or what you’re thinking of making–really matters?’ This was the question that my friend Dougald Hine and I were discussing over Skype at the end of last week. We started joking, he recounted how he’d come up with the one liner that ‘there’s something joke-like about the nature…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 