Tag: Solution

• May 10, 2014

  How the ‘problematized world’ can never become a home

  My last post rushed to this conclusion: ‘Thus, the problem-solver who tries to make the world into a home cannot do so.’ Let me try again, this time more slowly, in order to reach this conclusion. Recall that the kind of person we are describing believes that, in a basic sort of way, the world is full of problems and…
• May 9, 2014

  The world problem-solver: Not a home, not free enough

  The chief reason that one may spend one’s life trying to solve the world’s problems is that one believes that doing so is identical with the good life. To lead a good life is to solve the world’s problems. But this thesis cannot hold up under scrutiny. The world problem-solver, having taken the world not to be a home at the…
• May 8, 2014

  A-problematizing the world

  I have been investigating what I have called ‘the problematization of the world,’ which is one key fixture of our modern metaphysic. To ‘problematize the world,’ I have claimed, is to transform any concrete something or other into a problem demanding to be solved. It is commonly said that ‘crime is a problem’ or that ‘diabetes is…
• May 6, 2014

  The problematization of the world

  I also write about the problematization of the world in a recent Quartz piece. * You might have thought that food is an activity of cultivating and partaking and communing with others and that death is an event that calls upon us to make sense of our earthly lives, but it turns out that, like most things…