Category: meditation

• November 5, 2012

  Recitation as dishonesty, improv as honesty

  My initial response to both talks was that both spoke in smooth tongues. Their words flowed freely and were put together grammatically. Their styles were pleasing to the ear even if their voices–hers especially: Nussbaum’s–were tinny. For a few minutes, I listened to his lecture on Neoplatonism and to hers–Nussbaum’s–on Not for Profit. Her impromptu opening…
• November 2, 2012

  A brief review of the cognitive theory of emotions

  From time to time, I return to Martha Nussbaum’s understanding of our emotional life as it is elaborated in her books The Therapy of Desire and Upheavals of Thought. I have had reason to do so again recently. Diana Fritz Cates (see her book review: “Conceiving Emotions: Martha Nussbaum’s Upheavals of Thought,” The Journal of Religious Ethics 31.2 (Summer, 2003),…
• October 31, 2012

  Prospective, hypothetical inquiry

  Most of the work in my philosophy practice is focused on making sense of what has happened to someone where this “making sense of what has happened” involves fitting this event into a conceptual framework. Elsewhere, I have called this ‘philosophical holism’–a part is only intelligible in relation to a whole–and the insight into how…
• October 30, 2012

  ‘One feels wonderment upon witnessing a life transformed…’

  One feels wonderment upon witnessing a life transformed. What is expected is that life will stay the same in its essence or get worse with age. We get used to the idea of our burdens, are counseled to ‘manage’ or ‘cope’ with them. Sameness is our ailment, our life affliction once we have come of…
• October 26, 2012

  Metanoia and radiance: A morning meditatio

  We are speaking again, as if for the first time or final day, about the puzzle of self-transformation. We say that self-transformation is final yet ongoing. We say also that it has an aim yet that its aim is not external but rather internal to the practice of philosophy. This makes self-transformation out to be…