Category: philosophical counseling

• December 21, 2012

  ‘Beauty of soul, according to nature’: A short course at Schumacher College

  I have been invited by Schumacher College, which offers “transformative courses for sustainable living,” to teach a short course in November 2013. The following is my first attempt to make out what the course will be about. Philosophical Background Ancient philosophers held that a good life was one lived according to nature. Notably, ‘according to’…
• December 19, 2012

  On 3 moments of freedom

  Let’s examine a few different conceptions of freedom in hopes of arriving, in the end, at where we began. In his famous essay, “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,” the contemporary philosopher Harry Frankfurt states, “According to one familiar philosophical tradition, being free is fundamentally a matter of doing what one wants…
• December 10, 2012

  On sex, clumsiness, and adverbs

  Typically, we associate awkwardness, clumsiness, inelegance, and gracelessness with poor aesthetic performances alone, but could aesthetic considerations have any connection to ethical considerations? Could there be a point at which clumsiness cancelled out a good deed entirely? Sometimes we may think that what makes a good deed good is that the individual has the right…
• December 6, 2012

  Simplicity, silence, natural eloquence

  Porphyry relates this anecdote about his spiritual guide Plotinus: One day, when Origen came into his class, Plotinus blushed from head to toe, and made as if to stand up and put an end to the class. When Origen urged him to continue, Plotinus said, “One’s desire to talk is reduced when one knows that…
• December 5, 2012

  Rehearsing a line of thought

  Rehearsing a line of thought has its place in philosophical life. Saying this seems, however, to present us with a puzzle. If a philosophical inquiry is “an unrehearsed genre whose principal aims are, first, to reveal to us what we don’t know but thought we did and, second, to bring us a greater sense of…