Tag: Good

• April 23, 2014

  Overcoming sexual desire: On Sloterdijk’s You Must Change Your Life

  This is the seventh 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. A summary of Sloterdijk’s principal theses is available here. * Sloterdijk has written a book on anthropotechnics. He wants to redescribe human beings as those creatures who train themselves–some doing so explicitly, most implicitly–to…
• April 6, 2013

  Do we desire what is good, or do we call good what we desire?

  Socrates and Aristotle both say that we desire what is (or what we perceive to be) good. Spinoza and Nietzsche both believe that we call good what is it that we (already) desire. Who is right? David Wiggins suggests that we do not have to choose. Parsing Aristotle, he writes, ‘The good is the sort…
• November 9, 2012

  Plotinus on beauty (an exhortation)

  In “On Beauty” (Ennead 1.6), Plotinus invites us to consider “what it is that attracts the gaze of those who look at something, and turns and draws them to it and makes them enjoy the sight.” He thinks this is a particularly good question into what makes something beautiful when it is so called (his answer will…
• November 16, 2011

  On blurbs and encomia

  Had my encomium been turned into a blurb? On Sunday, I’d received a nice note in my inbox to the effect that the first issue of the Journal of Modern Wisdom had been selling at a good clip at the local book shops in Cambridge. A few weeks prior, I’d sent a favorable review of JMW…