Category: philosophical counseling

• July 4, 2014

  The contemplative life: Three ways of life available to us in modernity

  The title of my fall course at Kaos Pilots is ‘The Good Life and Sustaining Life.’ I want to think further about the sorts of things I’ll be teaching. Five things can be said immediately about this relationship. First, each is sui generis: the good life is unto itself, sustaining life unto itself. Second, the good life is…
• July 3, 2014

  The bullshitter vs. the philosopher

  There are at least two kinds of considerations of truthfulness that a bullshitter categorically refuses to acknowledge: sincerity and accuracy. These are the virtues of truthfulness that Bernard Williams writes about in his last book Truth and Truthfulness. By ‘sincerity,’ Williams means the expression of a belief. By ‘accuracy,’ he means a concern with getting things right.…
• July 2, 2014

  What’s so revolting about bullshitting?

  Rereading Harry Frankfurt’s essay ‘On Bullshit,’ which was originally published in 1986, only to become a surprise bestseller when it came out in book form in 2005, leaves one with the impression that Frankfurt has put his finger on a phenomenon that has, since then, grown uncomfortably, grotesquely large. When he writes that ‘bullshit is a greater enemy…
• 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…