Tag: Inquiry

• June 12, 2012

  The corporeal experience of a good philosophical conversation

  Let us define eros as an experience of nearness and extraordinary aliveness. Then we can begin to describe the experience of eros for an adept in philosophical life. My experience anyway. As a good philosophical conversation unfolds, I sense eros like so (though the ‘feel’ of each event is different, unique, fine-grained): my lungs grow…
• April 3, 2012

  ‘I spilled the ink across the page’: Reflections on inquiring about life

  Preface I spend a lot of my time trying out novel experiments, watching them unwind, and then puzzling through what I can learn about their reasons for unraveling. (Mine, a life in letters spelling out failures. All spilled ink across the page.) I worked at two start-ups, have run my own businesses, have conjured up…
• March 28, 2012

  On holding converse with myself and on taking proper care of myself

  I have been holding two thoughts in mind for quite a while and I now think it’s high time to bring them together. The first thought appears in Book VI of Diogenes Laertius’s The Lives of Eminent Philosophers. Diogenes Laertius relates that “When he [one philosopher named Antisthenes] was asked what advantage had accrued to him…
• January 31, 2012

  On education as ‘going along with the flow’; on choice as the offspring of distrust

  1 One of my fondest college memories is of proving Euclidean theorems all the way up to the precipice: the Parallel Postulate. Until one arrives at the Parallel Postulate, one can derive Euclidean geometry from 5 scintillatingly simple axioms. Each theorem can be clearly formulated, each proof can be neatly arranged according to the steps…