Tag: Self-examination

• October 27, 2014

  Letting others be: A fictitious admonition

  No words must needs be addressed to him if what he is doing does not accord with what I think he would be better off doing. Let him be. That there may be other ways of doing something, some incontrovertibly or demonstrably better than this one he prefers or seems to anyway: what of it, man? Am I…
• October 31, 2012

  Prospective, hypothetical inquiry

  Most of the work in my philosophy practice is focused on making sense of what has happened to someone where this “making sense of what has happened” involves fitting this event into a conceptual framework. Elsewhere, I have called this ‘philosophical holism’–a part is only intelligible in relation to a whole–and the insight into how…
• October 16, 2012

  40-somethings, the Last Man, and a tragic sense

  I found Simon Kuper’s “Fortysomethings: A Midterm Report” (Financial Times, October 12, 2012) especially illuminating. He writes that 40-somethings are both producers and products of sheer busyness: they are mid-career, married, with young children and mortgage payments. He observes that they do not have time to think about their lives. Consequently, “Nowhere in my peer…
• June 27, 2012

  Portrait rendered in marker

  My heartfelt thanks to one especially dear friend who drew this remarkable likeness of me.
• November 11, 2011

  Jane Austen as moral educator

  A copy of the revised Canterbury Classics edition of Jane Austen’s novels, in which my Introduction appears, arrived in the mailbox yesterday afternoon. I was surprised to see that one of the last words in the Introduction was “lifework.” When you read something you’ve written months or years before, you can’t quite see how the words…