Category: ethics

• June 30, 2014

  Philosophical Portraiture: Courage and Nobility

  About a month ago, Aleksandra completed a philosophical portrait of a woman who is seeking to live the life of a modern mystic (below). In her work on philosophical portraiture, the claim Aleksandra wants to make is that she is not rendering the subject in a too literal form of mimesis as if the photograph of…
• June 27, 2014

  The good life and sustaining life: Early reflections on my fall course at Kaos Pilots

  With special reference to the neighborhood dugnad * The subject of my fall course at Kaos Pilots is the connection between the good life and sustaining (or bare) life. Logically and chronologically, the question of the good life must come before that of sustaining life. It is not the case, I shall be arguing, that human beings first…
• June 24, 2014

  ‘This place would fall apart without me…’

  ‘This place would fall apart without me.’ Is that so? ‘Yes, were it not for my efforts, it would have already collapsed.’ So it teeters on the brink–is that it? ‘Not so long as I keep intervening. It’s a question of constant vigilance.’ Oh? Then suppose you were to let it go for a day. ‘Just walk away?’ No,…
• June 23, 2014

  The function of systems

  In an earlier post, I wrote that something that is broken has lost its sense of wholeness. While this is true at a formal level (formal cause), it leaves out the clearer implication that this machine has ceased to function as we would like it to. Quite naturally, we think that broken things are broken…
• June 21, 2014

  Calling tool talk into question

  On the assumption that the world is broken, one of the concepts that would come in handy (so to speak) would be that of the tool. The tool is an instrument for working on some bit of reality in order to improve it, repair it, or restore it. The tool is to be wielded in such a…