Category: politics
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‘I’m a person; I get things done’: More thoughts on the ‘problematization of the world’
Years ago, Aleksandra used to joke, ‘I’m a person; I get things done.’ It’s a perfect, timely joke. The joke could be translated into the terms of formal logic. If someone is a person, then he gets things done. And the contrapositive would be: if he doesn’t get things done, then he isn’t actually a person.…
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The problematization of the world
I also write about the problematization of the world in a recent Quartz piece. * You might have thought that food is an activity of cultivating and partaking and communing with others and that death is an event that calls upon us to make sense of our earthly lives, but it turns out that, like most things…
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‘Full of problems, the world requires solutions’
My thesis is that there is a reigning conception of the world that is held, consciously or not, by ecologists, political activists, designers, entrepreneurs, academics, NGO workers, as well as by those in the caring professions. And it is made explicit in the following set of assumptions, conceptions, and conclusions: 1.) Because the world is…
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Some very awkward truths about empathy
In the last handful of posts, I have sought to demonstrate some rather uncomfortable and infelicitous things about our near-universal celebration of empathy. One is that it is based on a false metaphysical picture of human beings as weak, suffering creatures. Another is that it has been raised from a ‘local virtue’ into an ascetic ideal, with the…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 