Category: politics

• April 30, 2014

  On a category mistake: ‘Human beings are weak’

  Here are three questions that fascinate me: 1.) How did we go from being creatures who above all ‘desire to know’ (Aristotle, Metaphysics I)–let us say: to understand our place in the world–to being creatures who want most of all to be helped (modernity)? 2.) How did the accidental property of weakness (e.g., feeling weak on Tuesday)…
• April 17, 2014

  ‘If the world is not fallen, then it is not in need of saving…’

  Here is an excerpt from a post-philosophical conversation note I wrote to one philosophical friend today. All of the assumptions below are typically made. My tacit suggestion is that they amount to what Gilbert Ryle famously terms ‘category mistakes.’ Of course, some things are problems; but, logically speaking, a human life cannot be a problem. It…
• April 16, 2014

  The main theses of Sloterdijk’s You Must Change Your Life

  This is the fourth set of reflections on Peter Sloterdijk’s You Must Change Your Life: On Anthropotechnics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013). The first set of reflections can be read here. * Let us review what we know about Stoterdijk’s basic philosophical orientation. 1.) Human beings are first and foremost practicing animals. Most practice what they do implicitly: even an ignoramus, Stoterdijk contends,…
• January 13, 2014

  Sustaining life is not the good life

  I write this post after spending time this morning contemplating the nature of things. This post is not a ‘product’ of that contemplation. * In Sources of the Self, Charles Taylor has some remarkable things to say about the disappearance of the higher forms of the good life during the passage to modernity. He argues that…
• October 15, 2013

  Philosophical horror: Making the world anew

  Perceiving political disorder, religious strife, social unrest, or economic collapse, philosophers have not infrequently regarded themselves as saviors who could, from out of the resources of the mind itself, create the world anew. This, argues Stephen Toulmin in Cosmopolis, is what occurred to Descartes who, upon witnessing the Thirty Years’ War, believed that he could…