Tag: Casuistry

• February 5, 2014

  The tentative, provisional, and presumptive

  A common error in thinking is to believe that a request, an invitation, or an offer is structured according to a Yes or a  No. Either I accept or I reject. Either I assent or else dissent. However, in many cases a binary operator may not be accurate or appropriate. Thus, one needs to consider,…
• April 9, 2013

  Looking for the man you’ve never met… On specifying

  Let’s suppose that you’re a detective and that you’re looking for a man you’ve never met before. Let’s suppose further that your initial specification–‘a man I’ve never met before’–is correct: namely, that you are looking for a man (not a woman, an animal, a child, a god, an angel, or a spirit) and that you’ve…
• February 25, 2012

  Now think fast!: Brief reflections on the making of ‘Despatches from the Invisible Revolution’

  The very idea of the book is undergoing a paradigm shift before our eyes. For the life of me, I can’t tell exactly what a book is, what it is supposed to do, how it is meant to loop into or out of our cultural moment, or what purpose it will likely serve in the…