Category: philosophical counseling
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Are You Meletus Or Socrates?
Each of us, right now, is presented with a choice: to be Meletus or Socrates. Most of us haven’t heard about Meletus and so, to be on the safe side, we may incline toward Socrates. But that is the dangerous option, as will be seen shortly. Meletus… Meletus is one of Socrates’s accusers in Plato’s…
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After Virtue 40 Years Later
I think this is the third or fourth time that I’ve read Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue (1981). What surprises me–each time–is just how good the book is. How insightful. How spot on. How prescient even in 2020. Here’s a brief summary of the first half of the book (since I haven’t finished it yet): First,…
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‘That’s Too Good For Me’
Who here hasn’t been prideful? Who, right here, isn’t prideful still? Who hasn’t said: “That’s too good for me”? Who hasn’t gotten huffy, murmuring under one’s breath: “That’s beneath me.” Whose anger isn’t slowly brought to a simmer, only to remain on a low boil? In 1981, Alasdair MacIntyre must have seen pride as the…
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The Best Thing Is To Be Told That You’re Full Of Shit
The best thing another can do for you is to tell you that you’re full of shit. And now, alas, for all the carats and qualifiers… The one telling you this shouldn’t be acting out of ill will, anger, or aggression. Buddhists call this “the second poison.” Instead, he or she should be acting with…
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The Confessors
The confessors out there do love their confessions. I don’t know who we have to blame for this shadowy development. The Romantics from whom the cult of interiority began? Or, as we come to our native soil, Emerson, who once wrote, “Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to this or that; the…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 