Category: politics

• June 25, 2013

  Rip Van Winkle: A parable

  Rip Van Wrinkle, writes Washington Irving, was ‘sorely perplexed,’ and nearly everything about him, including his appearance, had changed. His musket had rusted over, his beard had grown down to his waist, and the public places he used to frequent were no longer there or were in a state of disarray. In place of his old…
• May 22, 2013

  ‘I don’t know… Let’s find out.’

  Earlier this week, one conversation partner asked me to give him a better account of the art of inquiry. I replied that a certain genre of discourse would arise and would be suitable for a certain age. Panegyric and encomia would arise during, and be suitable for, a heroic age, since the poet’s job would…
• May 11, 2013

  On not owning a couch

  The best thing that fairly well-to-do parents can do today would be to refuse the temptation to buy their children their first couch. A few recent tweets tell something of the story about the American precariat: ‘Student Debt Slows Growth as Young Spend Less’ http://nyti.ms/10xd0uG  (More news about status of American #precariat) ‘The Idled Young Americans’:…
• May 10, 2013

  Benedict or Cicero? Field philosophy or the monastic?

  Day 1. A philosopher is neither a teller nor an adviser. Day 2. What Dancy’s Late Late Show appearance has to say about the philosopher’s disappearance Day 3. ‘Living’ philosophy: Field philosophy Scholars of Aristotle have long been divided over the answer Aristotle gives to the question of how best to live. Much of the Nicomachean Ethics points in…
• May 8, 2013

  ‘Living’ philosophy (I): ‘Field philosophy’

  If one were so inclined, one could write an alternative history of American philosophy. Chiefly, that history would recount, beginning with American pragmatists such as Dewey and William James, its rise during the period when serious magazines were still financially viable, reaching its high-water mark with such works as Walter Lippmann’s defense of natural law…