Tag: sustaining life
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The Good Life and Sustaining Life: Vague Words and Well-specified Questions
Certain philosophical terms have been slowly creeping into business culture and everyday speech, terms such as ‘meaning,’ ‘value,’ ‘direction,’ and ‘purpose,’ without its being possible, with any clarity or analytical rigor, to pin down their meanings. Calling a project ‘meaningful’ implies that one is drawing a line between projects that are not meaningful and those…
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The Good Life and Sustaining Life: Definitions (Excerpt)
Preliminary Remark The good life and sustaining life are two separate, albeit connected, concepts. How they are connected, when they are connected properly, is the subject of this philosophical investigation. Definitions and Distinctions 1. By ‘the good life,’ I mean that for the sake of which one ultimately lives. 2. Throughout the course of this…
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The Good Life and Sustaining Life: An Inquiry into Our Great Vexation (An excerpt)
Preface: Our Great Vexation There may be no greater vexation in our time than the question of how to make a living in a manner that accords with leading a good life. Laypersons may evade the question merely by closing their eyes and keeping their heads down; doing so involves the great effort of remaining…
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The only 3 ways of making a living: Reflections on sustaining life
Yesterday, I had a breakthrough in how I think about economic relationships when these are understood in the most basic terms possible. The occasion for my thinking about this question is my upcoming fall course, ‘The Good Life and Sustaining Life,’ at Kaos Pilots. There are three principal questions that make up the course I’ll be teaching:
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How to know that I’m not wasting my life
One needs some kind of perspicuous conceptual distinction between the good life and sustaining life if one hopes to be able to make any sense of one’s doubt concerning whether or not one is wasting one’s life. (I take ‘wasting my life’ to be a philosophical question raised most clearly, most existentially only within the confines of the modern age.)…