Category: philosophical counseling

• October 20, 2012

  Cavell on the skeptical moment

  Excerpt from Stanley Cavell, “The Philosopher in American Life,” In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. * I came to the idea that philosophy’s task was not so much to defeat the skeptical argument as to preserve it, as though the philosophical profit of the argument…
• October 19, 2012

  Philosophy as metanoetics

  Excerpt from Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, trans. Takeuchi Yoshinori, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. * [L]ife consists of the continuous practice of “death-and-resurrection.” Metanoesis is practicing, and also being made to practice, this “death-and-resurrection” according to criteria of the value and meaning of our existence, or, more correctly, of the valuelessness and meaninglessness of…
• October 18, 2012

  Spiritual exercise and metaphysical experience: A birthday meditation

  Yesterday afternoon on my birthday, we knocked on the door of a secret meditation room in Soho and no one answered. She knocked a second time and still no one answered. And yet why weren’t we disappointed? “Maybe this is the meditation,” I said as we walked away and laughed. The incident calls me back…
• October 16, 2012

  40-somethings, the Last Man, and a tragic sense

  I found Simon Kuper’s “Fortysomethings: A Midterm Report” (Financial Times, October 12, 2012) especially illuminating. He writes that 40-somethings are both producers and products of sheer busyness: they are mid-career, married, with young children and mortgage payments. He observes that they do not have time to think about their lives. Consequently, “Nowhere in my peer…
• October 8, 2012

  On Hadot’s ‘third way’ of doing philosophy

  I read an essay by Pierre Hadot’s main translator Michael Chase about philosophy as a way of life (PWL). In “Observations on Pierre Hadot’s Conception of Philosophy as a Way of Life,” Chase proposes that PWL could be a ‘third way’ of doing philosophy that is neither analytic nor Continental. In my experience (which chimes, I would…