Category: politics

• November 22, 2011

  On murmuring as a clue to the problem of authority

  In Chapter 40 of the Rule of Life, the guidebook that has served as a basis for Christian monastic life for the past 1500 years, St. Benedict discusses how much wine is to be apportioned to each member of the monastic community. Perhaps a “half-measure of wine every day should suffice,” he says, but then he…
• November 21, 2011

  Why we need good authority

  According to The Rule of Life of the Community of Jesus, the handbook of The Community of Jesus, an ecumenical Benedictine monastery located in Orleans, Mass., “Our common life is… sustained and directed through a mutually recognized order of governance, articulated in this Rule of Life and built upon the legitimate exercise of authority and the…
• November 18, 2011

  Public lectures on philosophy as a way of life

  Peter Adamson, a professor of ancient philosophy at Kings College London, is in the midst of recording an extensive number of 20-25 minute lectures addressed to the generally educated person on the “history of philosophy without any gaps.” His lectures on Aristotle’s ethics are fine and lucid as are his talks on the Cynics and the Cyrenaics.…
• November 17, 2011

  On 3 needful jobs in the 21st C.

  Methodology Today I’ll be doing one kind of speculative philosophy. I’ll be asking what kinds of jobs may be needful in the coming years. These will be jobs I’ve made up because they don’t yet exist. I’ll be basing my speculative inquiry on a number of assumptions about the present social world. (These assumptions may…
• November 10, 2011

  Our arquebus moment

  A philosophical review of Saul Frampton’s When I Am Playing With My Cat, How Do I Know that She Is Not Playing with Me? Montaigne and Being in Touch with Life (New York: Random House, 2011). — The rending of man from nature first came with the flood. Before that, one must imagine a time of amity,…