Category: philosophical counseling

• May 1, 2013

  Cultivating discipline: A forthcoming manual

  I’m beginning to think about the contents of a short guide, Cultivating Discipline, which I’ll likely be using in some upcoming educational workshops. One chapter, I believe, will be on spiritual exercises, which I plan to arrange according to categories. Pierre Hadot suggests that a spiritual exercise is a meditation aimed less at informing the pupil about…
• April 29, 2013

  The rigor of meditation practice

  There is a rigor involved in meditating regularly that calls me back to meditate well before dawn in spite of the passing desire to stop or the urges to make an exception today. The rigor of a meditation practice emerges only for the one who, like the Pyrrhonian skeptic, would not live according to dogma.…
• April 26, 2013

  Can we tell an alternative story of not being at home?

  ‘The one who masters walking leaves no footprints. / The one who masters speaking makes no slips of the tongue.’ —Daodejing 27, trans. Wenlong Lu and Keith Wayne Brown I believe one could write an alternative story of human embodiment, worldly engagement, and understanding that would not avail itself of a psychologist’s categories but would…
• April 25, 2013

  Beauty of Soul: Course Schedule

  My  Short Course at Schumacher College, ‘Beauty of Soul, According to Nature,’ has now been posted on Schumacher College’s website. The course is set to run from November 4-8. I’m including an early draft of the Course Schedule below. Opening Talk ‘The Beautiful Life of the Virtues’ What would modern moral philosophers make of the following…
• April 23, 2013

  Beauty of Soul: A Short Course at Schumacher College

  My  Short Course at Schumacher College, ‘Beauty of Soul, According to Nature,’ has now been posted on Schumacher College’s website. The course is set to run from November 4-8. Please take a look, and come and join me in Totnes if you’re free. I hear it’s beautiful there. From time to time, I’ll be posting some…