Category: philosophical counseling

• March 6, 2015

  ‘No one is so wrong as the man who knows all the answers’ (Merton)

  Thomas Merton summarizes the teachings of Zhuang Zhou (Chuang Tzu) so beautifully: ‘No one is so wrong as the man who knows all the answers.’ This is from The Way of Chuang Tzu. How wrong: wrong in a moral sense? Perhaps. But primarily wrong in an epistemic sense as in incorrect or mistaken, in error. Whence: ‘No one is…
• February 18, 2015

  Cultural devastation vs. cultural collapse: First thoughts on Radical Hope

  Suppose we were to think about a people’s way of life’s going out of existence. What sort of hope, Jonathan Lear asks in his short book Radical Hope, could a people have for a life well-lived going otherwise? In his brief comments on Lear’s book, the insightful Heideggerian philosopher Hubert Dreyfus points to a confusion in…
• February 17, 2015

  Wondering and wandering

  It is wonderful to think about the connection between wandering and wondering. ‘Wandering about, he wondered about…’ ‘Wondering, he wandered…’ The connection can be bi-causal: Wondering over X led him to wander about in the library. Wandering into the magical garden caused him to ask, ‘What in the world is that?’
• February 6, 2015

  From insistence to amazement

  1. I insist that P. OED Etymology:  < Latin insistĕre to stand upon, persist, dwell upon Insisting that P means either (a) maintaining that a thing is so (OED) or (b) urging that some course of action must be taken. Example of (a): ‘I insist that federal taxes are too high.’ Example of (b): ‘Off with his head! Off with…
• February 3, 2015

  Fallibilism: Saying what you believe without insisting

  This would be our Socratic starting point: Say what you believe, but do not insist that it must be true or that your belief cannot be incorrect. Stated this way, the position looks a lot like fallibilism. Key to our understanding of human beings is the fact that they do err. The desire to find a secure position…