Tag: Inquiry

• August 6, 2012

  What makes the right question right? (II)

  I have been writing about the art of inquiry with a view to understanding, in a preliminary fashion, how any philosophical inquiry of the kind I have in mind can ever get underway. The implicit aim in this endeavor is to show that philosophical inquiry is ‘self-transformative’: that it is the kind of activity that,…
• August 3, 2012

  What makes the wrong question wrong? (I)

  I One aim of a good inquiry, I have urged, is clarity in the broadest possible sense. Only a good question can allow for an inquiry to get underway. I would like to examine what makes a wrong question the wrong one (Part I) and what makes the right question the right one (Part II). What makes…
• August 2, 2012

  Commitment as a precondition to inquiry

  Earlier today I was speaking with Pete Sims at Kaos Pilots about the art of inquiry. Based in Denmark, Kaos Pilots is a three-year program of study in social entrepreneurship. During the third year, students are invited to create a social business project that will take them, quite possibly, to faraway places and put them…
• August 1, 2012

  Confronting our thinking in general

  I want to say that the focus of my life is on teaching the art of inquiry. Yesterday, I said that one of the aims of a good inquiry is to disabuse us of our ignorance. To be humbled in this manner is to enter into a time of exceptional confusion. Can anything interesting be said of…
• 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…