Category: ethics
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Oh, to hell with work/life balance
Wouldn’t it be nice to get your work life back into balance? (This, my friends, is known as the hook. You read it on the subway, see it on the tele, hear it on the old time radio, and it gets ya.) Now that you’re grabbed: These days, oh these days, my friends, people just…
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On the art of translation and a sense of a style
On the Art of Translation. Of David Bellos’s Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything (New York: Faber & Faber, 2011), a reviewer at The New Yorker observes, “In the English-speaking world, translation is mostly understood as [here quoting Bellos] ‘the transfer of meaning from one language to another,’ a sense derived…
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Letter writing as spiritual exercise
Aperitif the First: Yesterday around noon I was running in Central Park. It was unseasonably warm–mid-50s I want to say. I was rounding Lasker Rink and Pool when I caught something out of the corner of my eye and belatedly, unpoetically jumped out of the way. I looked down and began to laugh. It was a…
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The starting point of philosophical self-reflection
Philosophical thinking begins in severance, in cleavage, in destruction and loss. Something once as familiar as morning light has fled, and its return is in doubt. Our feet, once paddles, have morphed into trunks. Severance begets pain, pain shuddering, and shuddering puts forth philosophical words: self-reflective words, ungainly words, coarse concepts, bedraggled thoughts. Oh but…
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Making sense of Occupy Wall Street: Tragic senses and synoptic views
The Distinction between Tragic Senses and Synoptic Views It is to long form literature, above all the novel form, that we turn for a tragic sense of life. The novel especially affords the reader a phenomenological account of the tragic experiences of ordinary people leading ordinary lives amid the godlike forces of social transformation. (See,…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 
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