Tag: Institution

• January 26, 2012

  A picture of a philosophical way of life followed by a medium-length rant

  An anecdote: Yesterday, while strolling through the grocery store, I heard a young mother say the following to her young son: “Honey, you just have to be happy with the music they play for you. Bon Jovi’s OK.” — Human Anthropology 1. Human beings are thoroughgoing social animals. I.e., social life is ‘metaphysically prior’ to…
• November 28, 2011

  On murmuring, alienation, and institutional failures

  The philosopher David E. Cooper’s massive doorstop, World Religions: A Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), does have a leitmotiv. It is the “problem of ‘alienation’ or ‘estrangement.’” By these terms, they [Hegel and Marx] meant the sense which many human beings–all of them, perhaps, at times–have of being ‘strangers’, of not being ‘at home’, in…