Category: philosophical counseling
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Horror: Airbnb ‘disrupting’ the evening meal
During a recent conversation with my friend Pete Sims about my upcoming Kaos Pilots course, ‘The Good Life and Sustaining Life,’ we spent some time discussing the case of Airbnb. Airbnb came to mind because I had recently written a post about a certain category mistake: those companies which urge us to take part in the ‘sharing’ economy…
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How to know that I’m not wasting my life
One needs some kind of perspicuous conceptual distinction between the good life and sustaining life if one hopes to be able to make any sense of one’s doubt concerning whether or not one is wasting one’s life. (I take ‘wasting my life’ to be a philosophical question raised most clearly, most existentially only within the confines of the modern age.)…
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My doubts about the ‘sharing’ economy
On Twitter, my friend Dougald Hine brought Susie Cagle’s comic-laced article, ‘The Case Against Sharing: On Access, Scarcity, and Trust,’ to my attention. In this post, Cagle argues that the ‘sharing’ economy is only nominally so. The economic and historical conditions that make possible this ‘sharing’ economy cannot, she thinks, be lost sight of. She writes, ‘The…
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Distinguishing the active life from the contemplative life
It is not so easy to draw a meaningful distinction between the active life and the contemplative life. Too strict and a way of life becomes suffocating. Too broad and it seems no difficult thing to shuttle back and forth between one and the other when, in reality, it seems rare that an individual can lead both…
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The active life: Ways of life available to us in modernity
More reflections on my fall course at Kaos Pilots * Given the distinction between the good life and sustaining life and given also that the former furnishes us with a reason for being while the latter, on its own, can only answer the question of how to go on, it follows that someone will be…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 