Tag: Ethics

• June 11, 2012

  Adderall and philosophical life

  The Sunday New York Times front page article on the pervasiveness of Adderall use among wealthy high school students, “Risky Rise of the Good-Grade Pill: Taking Stimulants Not for a High, but for a Higher SAT Score” (June 10, 2012), misses the philosophical point. The reporter Alan Schwarz covers the usual suspects–availability, pervasiveness, potentially adverse side…
• May 15, 2012

  Ethical life restored (VII)

  VII Silent of speech is nature’s course. Laozi, Daodejing, 23 Can we still follow nature’s course under nature’s gently guiding hand? I think so but only if we let nature return to its humble home and only after we learn again to listen to its silent speech. In early May, my love Alexandra and I spent a…
• May 8, 2012

  Acting contrary to nature or living according to nature? (I)

  I Somewhere near the passage to modernity, the philosophical tree sprouted some branches and grew dead. How many branches, pray, before it breathed its final breath? The contemporary philosopher Harry Frankfurt holds up his fingers, counts two, and then shades in a third. The first branch is epistemology which, he says, is concerned with “what…
• December 24, 2011

  Aesthetics, ethics, and justice ask to be brought into harmony

  Beyond my bedroom window: pigeons atop a barren tree amid the autumn drizzle. * Beyond the living room window: a birch tree, leaves burnt by fire, hoary frost unworldly. Brief Reflections 1. To see an object properly, discriminatively, is to be attentive to its demands. 2. The object asks to be loved. Will you love…
• December 23, 2011

  On Anne Page’s courage

  The woman was beautiful and strong but sad. Doubtless she married badly. Evidence for this can be perceived in her slightly downcast left eye; in her stilted, rigid left hand; in the spine that gives the impression of needing to be held up by strength of will. To one with her aesthetic temperament, life had…