Category: philosophical counseling
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Reflections on the past 2 years of post-academic life
It had been almost two years since I’d re-read my paper, “Whither Moral Education?,” and what struck me only yesterday was the tone. The style of the piece caught my ear like a thief in the night. I could hear, as I hadn’t been able to before, a tinny shrillness, a crankiness, a forlornness. What…
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Whither moral education?
Abstract “In “Whither Moral Education?,” (World and I, November 2011), I argue that American education has for far too long set aside the questions of the good and the meaningful–or, what is the same thing, the moral and intellectual virtues. First I attempt to identify what factors gave rise to this phenomenon and then in the final pages to explore how…
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The hardness and the softness of philosophical practice
“Whitman’s central image, the leaves of grass, a form of life that perishes but rises again and again out of its own decay” (231). –Lewis Hyde, The Gift “Anything I have I bestow.” –Walt Whitman, Song of Myself There is a hardness as well as a softness to the philosophical life. Like leaves of grass,…
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On invitations to have philosophical conversations, disciplines of eating, smallholding farming, and much more on Pindar and St. Benedict
In the spirit of giving, I’d like to invite you to have a philosophical conversation with me. Let’s call it philosophical conversation as gift giving. I’ve been meeting a lot of people this way in the past couple weeks. My strolling card is filling up, but let’s see if we can make it work. What’s…
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Burning Man: Spiritual experience, gift exchange, & primal ritual
I ask again what we’re to make of spiritual experience in the early 21st C. and I hear again more first answers. And I think again of the place of gift exchange in this new order of being. And I read again about Burning Man–how strange, how primal, how elemental, how transient. Simone Ubaldi explores…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 