Category: ethics
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Friday meditation: On the alchemy of reconceptualization
Fine phrase this. So what’s this (he consults his piece of paper) ‘alchemy of reconceptualization,’ as you call it? It’s an ongoing process of making sense of one’s life. It involves surveying the parts of your past and transforming the self. Bear in mind that it’s not a one-off, and yet there are rest stops…
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Reflections on the past 2 years of post-academic life
It had been almost two years since I’d re-read my paper, “Whither Moral Education?,” and what struck me only yesterday was the tone. The style of the piece caught my ear like a thief in the night. I could hear, as I hadn’t been able to before, a tinny shrillness, a crankiness, a forlornness. What…
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Whither moral education?
Abstract “In “Whither Moral Education?,” (World and I, November 2011), I argue that American education has for far too long set aside the questions of the good and the meaningful–or, what is the same thing, the moral and intellectual virtues. First I attempt to identify what factors gave rise to this phenomenon and then in the final pages to explore how…
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The hardness and the softness of philosophical practice
“Whitman’s central image, the leaves of grass, a form of life that perishes but rises again and again out of its own decay” (231). –Lewis Hyde, The Gift “Anything I have I bestow.” –Walt Whitman, Song of Myself There is a hardness as well as a softness to the philosophical life. Like leaves of grass,…
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On invitations to have philosophical conversations, disciplines of eating, smallholding farming, and much more on Pindar and St. Benedict
In the spirit of giving, I’d like to invite you to have a philosophical conversation with me. Let’s call it philosophical conversation as gift giving. I’ve been meeting a lot of people this way in the past couple weeks. My strolling card is filling up, but let’s see if we can make it work. What’s…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 