Category: politics

• January 19, 2012

  Stone Soup, mutual dependency, and a new economic order

  In “The Story of Stone Soup,” as Antonio Dias tells it, a wandering beggar comes upon a village. Hungry and tired, he goes to each door and is met with the same answer again and again. There is, he is told, not enough to go around, and the door, half-opened, is soon closed upon him.…
• January 17, 2012

  Imagining 2 economic worlds: relative abundance and relative scarcity

  Let’s build a naturalistic account of a social order under the conditions, first, of abundance and, next, of scarcity. By a “naturalistic account,” I mean the most formal rendering conceivable of human activity based solely on the simplest principles of human life and on the most threadbare of “lived logics.” Below, points 1-4 are neutral…
• January 10, 2012

  On lived logic and speculative philosophy

  The Stoics enjoined their pupils to live according to nature. The dictum, in essence, says that metaphysics is the way of ethics. If my way of my life is not in harmony with the way of the world, then I shall be overcome with strife, believing either in the power of my will to crush…
• January 7, 2012

  ‘I pray to lay my limbs in the ground as one who gladdened his fellow-citizens’

  The following is an excerpt from Pindar’s Nemea Ode 8. Pindar (ca. 518-438 BC) was a lyrical poet living during the Archaic Age in ancient Greece. The extant odes, apparently representing only a small part of his oeuvre, commemorate the victories of athletes from the Olympian, Pythian, Ishmian, and Nemean Games. Apart from the high…
• December 31, 2011

  On the sorry state of gift giving

  In modern culture, the ethos of gift giving has come to resemble the genre of the apologia. The defendant–guarded, vigilant–is made to choose between pre-emption, exculpation, and exoneration. These are her weapons. “But I wasn’t sure what to get you.” A reminder of how tenuous our acquaintance, how limited our imaginations. “I know, I know, I…