Category: philosophical counseling

• April 6, 2013

  Do we desire what is good, or do we call good what we desire?

  Socrates and Aristotle both say that we desire what is (or what we perceive to be) good. Spinoza and Nietzsche both believe that we call good what is it that we (already) desire. Who is right? David Wiggins suggests that we do not have to choose. Parsing Aristotle, he writes, ‘The good is the sort…
• April 4, 2013

  The Daoist ethic without principles

  ‘Now the Taoist ideal,’ writes the ever-quarky Raymond Smullyan in his best Lewis Carroll The Tao is Silent, ‘is not so much to feel that he shouldn’t be moral (which is, of course, a morality all its own), but rather to be independent, free, unentangled from moral “principles”‘ (112). The poem from the first chapter of the…
• April 2, 2013

  A moral particularist’s friends

  A moral particularist thinks we can get on well enough, in a moral sense, without a ready supply of principles. What is right to do in one context may not be right to do in some other, but what is right to do in this context is determined by what is revealed in this context.…
• March 30, 2013

  Split wood, light breathing

  The Dao has nothing to say not because it is mute, not because it is coy but because it communicates in its own way. Best, therefore, not to ask it anything but to rest–anywhere–in the light of its presence. On  this second spring, the mountains will serve that end. The Daoist Sage does everything lightly,…
• March 29, 2013

  Wake up! An admonition

  I have observed of late with a frown that many people too soon adapt to events that have the potential of being world-sundering. I have had reason to revisit the claim I made in 2011 about ‘strategies of retention’: Understanding the reasons why a practice is causing somebody disquietude will involve more than helping her…