Tag: philosophy
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Fundraising in the Context of a Gift Economy
My friend Jonatan Spejlborg is currently raising funds for the artist residency and school he and his colleagues are creating. Specifically, they need to raise money in order to build the house where participants will live, work, and create. I offered a gift contribution earlier today, and I invite you to do the same. You can…
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The decline of patronage and the rise of philanthropy
A patron is to a contemplative age what a philanthropist is to an action-oriented one. During the passage to modernity, we see a slow yet undeniable shift away from patronage as a way of displaying generosity and toward philanthropy as a ‘style’ of contributing to social change. Edward Craig’s well-researched book The Mind of God…
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Walking… philosophy… waking: A reverie
My personal essay on Daoism and philosophical practice can now be read at The Dark Mountain Project. In terms of genre, it embodies the form of a gift. It also serves as a companion piece for my intellectual history, “Following Nature’s Course,” Dark Mountain Project: Book 3, which is forthcoming.
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On good humor and good thinking
1 The story goes that Plato is giving a lecture in the Academy on the essence of man. “What is man?” he asks. His pupils listen intently. “Man,” he answers, “is a featherless biped.” It is these properties that, conjointly, distinguish us from the mere brutes. At which point, Diogenes of Sinope bursts into the…
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The hardness and the softness of philosophical practice
“Whitman’s central image, the leaves of grass, a form of life that perishes but rises again and again out of its own decay” (231). –Lewis Hyde, The Gift “Anything I have I bestow.” –Walt Whitman, Song of Myself There is a hardness as well as a softness to the philosophical life. Like leaves of grass,…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 