Tag: Good Life

• 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…
• March 14, 2013

  Design ethics: The good life and the art of inquiry

  I’ve been invited to write two chapters for a forthcoming collected volume on design ethics. The first chapter will be concerned with philosophical inquiry and the good life, the second with three different conceptions of ethics: conviction, responsibility, and attention. In my first chapter, I’ll be arguing, at least in part, that (a) philosophical inquiring…
• July 9, 2012

  And when…

  When does silence come and when do the right words come? When does life come and when death? When do the church bells ring, when roll the air, when cease to ring? When do your needs begin and mine end or mine begin and yours end? When do we sit in solitude and when do…
• May 28, 2012

  If I could not touch, could I be touched?

  This morning I lay in bed, looking at my hand. I extend the web, I turn it over, I hold it up to the sky. It is tanned and fleshy and the freshly laundered sheets are very white again. I grind coffee beans with my hand mill. I put the spoon into the bowl, then…
• April 30, 2012

  Attention: attendere (L.), tenderness; attend: to turn one’s ear to, listen to

  I am writing half an hour before nightfall. Before I awoke on Sunday, a mosquito kept buzzing in my ear, reminding me of dear Emily’s buzzing Fly. I awoke with the dawn, the sun having made its case rather nonchalantly this morning. Around 7:20 a.m., the sun cast itself upon room and walls and trees…