Category: ethics

• November 11, 2011

  Jane Austen as moral educator

  A copy of the revised Canterbury Classics edition of Jane Austen’s novels, in which my Introduction appears, arrived in the mailbox yesterday afternoon. I was surprised to see that one of the last words in the Introduction was “lifework.” When you read something you’ve written months or years before, you can’t quite see how the words…
• November 10, 2011

  Our arquebus moment

  A philosophical review of Saul Frampton’s When I Am Playing With My Cat, How Do I Know that She Is Not Playing with Me? Montaigne and Being in Touch with Life (New York: Random House, 2011). — The rending of man from nature first came with the flood. Before that, one must imagine a time of amity,…
• November 9, 2011

  Good art is good for much: An end to the problem of funding

  I knew nothing about improvisation until a few days ago, but for some time I’ve latched onto the idea that the philosophical conversations in my philosophy practice have been shading into territory laid open by improv. So when I spoke with Alex Fradera, a friend of Dougald’s who finished his Ph.D. in psychology and who now…
• November 8, 2011

  3 misconceptions about the making of art

  Yesterday, I set out to sweep away the funding models for the artistic life that have been prevalant, let’s say, from around WWII up to the present. If an individual wanted to lead a creative life and she was coming of age in the post-war period, she was presented with three options. One was Bohemia:…
• November 5, 2011

  Roberto Unger on ‘the future of the left’

  A breathtaking interview with Roberto Unger, “The Future of the Left,” The European (October 24, 2011) about the need to think differently. My curating below. (If you grant Unger’s conclusions, then you’ll have to also grant how truly “paradigm-shifting” his ideas are.) — Rethinking Modern Institutions “My view is that all the fundamental problems of the European…