Category: ethics

• November 20, 2012

  The relationship between direct speech and philosophical inquiry

  Direct Speech and Philosophical Inquiry I believe we creatures of habit, we too-clever beings have learned all forms of indirect speech. To overcome indirectness, I have sought to teach direct speech. Indeed, I have insisted that a philosophical conversation cannot begun unless the philosophical guide and the conversation partner engage exclusively in direct speech. In…
• November 19, 2012

  Giving an honest self-inventory; or, how to be post-ironic

  The literary scholar Christy Wampole has called ours an “ironic age” in which “directness has become unbearable to us,” and in “How to Live Without Irony,” her New York Times Stone essay that appeared in this Sunday’s Review, she provides some clues for how we could live in a post-ironic manner.  These clues include saying what…
• November 16, 2012

  Responsibility as a child of time

  The Pythagoreans were the first, perhaps, to insist so doggedly that one give an account of oneself at the end of each day as if it were one’s final hour. What is responsibility for the entirety of one’s self but taking this thought to heart not at some late date but in each of one’s…
• November 9, 2012

  Plotinus on beauty (an exhortation)

  In “On Beauty” (Ennead 1.6), Plotinus invites us to consider “what it is that attracts the gaze of those who look at something, and turns and draws them to it and makes them enjoy the sight.” He thinks this is a particularly good question into what makes something beautiful when it is so called (his answer will…
• November 7, 2012

  To the country to be full-time cultivars of the spirit

  I now have the warm socks, the woolen ones; they came in the mail yesterday. I’m told the wood is stacked up in the shed, ready in case the power goes out. We’re supposed to pick up an axe (the old one looked a shame, even to a novice such as myself) as well as…