Tag: Friendship
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Whatever Happened To Work, Friendship, & Family?
Charles Taylor argued quite convincingly in Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989) that one of the hallmarks of modernity is “the affirmation of ordinary life”: immanent goods like family, friends, and work are to be embraced. This marks the turn toward worldliness that is a fundamental feature still of the…
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Love, friendship, and work
In Sources of the Self, the philosopher Charles Taylor argues that what is distinctive about the modern world is that many of us have come to regard the claims of ordinary life as being ultimately fulfilling. Someone’s falling in love, raising a family, maintaing a close-knit group of friends, and doing meaningful work would, on this…
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‘Yet here I am in my wretchedness’
The end of Chapter 6 of Chuang Tsu’s Inner Chapters is startling. It has been raining for 10 days, and one friend, Tsu Ysu, believes his friend Tsu Sang to be in a bad way. When he arrives at Tsu Sang’s house, he hears a lamentation. ‘O Mother! O Father! Is it heaven, or is it man?’
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On improv and philosophy
Before I met Alex Fradera yesterday afternoon, I tweeted my friend Dougald, “@dougald, journeyman on pilgrimage. I’m seeing Alex in NYC tomorrow. Shall I send your best to him?” He replied, “@andrewjtaggart Wonderful! Please do – and give him a big hug from me.” I did. Alex finished his Ph.D. in psychology and for six…
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Philosophical friendships: A gentle refutation
A few days ago I tried to meet an objection to leading a philosophical life that ran something like this: “Andrew, it is all well and good for a philosopher to surround himself entirely with philosophical friends, but the rest of us live, and have to live, more ‘in the world,’ where living ‘in the…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 