Category: philosophical counseling

• August 14, 2017

  ‘Caring Less About Work, We Open Ourselves Up to the Vertical Dimension of Life….’

  We live in an age of total work. Consider the successful startup CEO who puts in 100 hours a week while transforming the rest of his life–sleeping, eating, meditating, working out, commuting, socializing–into a work-like means for enhancing productivity. Or the drug abusing lawyer working for a prestigious Silicon Valley law firm found dead by…
• July 24, 2017

  Josef Pieper on the Waning of Philosophy in the Time of Total Work

  In preparation for writing a couple of articles for Quartz and Aeon on total work, I thought I would try to make some sense of Josef Pieper’s insightful Leisure: The Basis of Culture (1948), In Tune with the World: A Theory of Festivity (1965), “The Condition of Philosophy Today,” and “The Condition of Philosophy in the Modern World” (1950).…
• June 16, 2017

  Did Homo Sapiens Make Two Faustian Bargains With Work?

  This essay should be read as a work of science fiction or as speculative rumination. The idea, in what follows, is to push the envelope with regard to my thinking about the place and value of work in modern life. Whether many of the claims contained herein are true I really couldn’t say. A Day…
• May 31, 2017

  Crossroads: A Sanctuary For Spirituality

  Upcoming Exhibition My wife Alexandra Dawn Taggart will be exhibiting at freSH Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, from June 8th-June 25th, 2017. “Crossroads: A Sanctuary for Spirituality” is a group exhibition that seeks to embrace religious and spiritual diversity by presenting visual artwork that’s born from an artist’s spiritual practice. The exhibition is hosted…
• May 4, 2017

  Total Work, the Chief Enemy of Philosophy

  This piece is an accompaniment to a fiery LinkedIn post I wrote yesterday. * I used to think that the chief enemies of philosophy were bullshit and deception. Bullshit because, as Harry Frankfurt in On Bullshit argues, it shows a complete unconcern, or lack of care, for truth. The bullshitter advances whatever will make the ruse efficacious, so…