Category: meditation

• July 1, 2014

  Pragmatist consulting: The art of bullshitting well

  ‘Once, when contemplating the apparently endless growth of administrative responsibilities in British academic departments, I came up with one possible vision of hell. Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don’t like and are not especially good at.’ –David Graeber, ‘On the Phenomenon…
• 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 20, 2014

  And if the world weren’t broken?

  It is often said that the world is broken and thus in need of fixing. I do not think so. We would not say that something is broken unless we also thought that it had once been intact. Something that is intact has all its pieces together, with each piece connected in the proper fashion to…