Category: politics

• June 27, 2014

  The good life and sustaining life: Early reflections on my fall course at Kaos Pilots

  With special reference to the neighborhood dugnad * The subject of my fall course at Kaos Pilots is the connection between the good life and sustaining (or bare) life. Logically and chronologically, the question of the good life must come before that of sustaining life. It is not the case, I shall be arguing, that human beings first…
• June 23, 2014

  The function of systems

  In an earlier post, I wrote that something that is broken has lost its sense of wholeness. While this is true at a formal level (formal cause), it leaves out the clearer implication that this machine has ceased to function as we would like it to. Quite naturally, we think that broken things are broken…
• June 20, 2014

  And if the world weren’t broken?

  It is often said that the world is broken and thus in need of fixing. I do not think so. We would not say that something is broken unless we also thought that it had once been intact. Something that is intact has all its pieces together, with each piece connected in the proper fashion to…
• June 19, 2014

  4 responses to the world’s being broken

  Suppose you begin with the thought that the world in its entirety is broken. Then, there are only four possible ways of responding to its brokenness: return it to a prior state before it was broken, bring it to a new state that is better off than the broken state, smash the broken thing and begin…
• June 18, 2014

  ‘Could be broken’ and ‘is broken’

  In the last couple of posts, I have been examining this argument: 2.) Because the world is broken or out-of-order, it needs to be fixed or restored. Let me set the stage for the next post about the view that the world (or some large sections of it anyway) is already broken. So far, I have…