Tag: Virtue
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Lines composed the morning after the Noreaster (Plotinus, Ennead 1.6)
Lovers love the beautiful. Plotinus inquires what about the beautiful makes it so. Early on in Ennead 1, he says (pace the Stoics) that it is not the mere proportions of the thing that make whatever the thing is beautiful, hence not the proper relations of part to whole. For cannot a line be beautiful and cannot a…
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The Art of Inquiry: Bewilderment and the virtues
Excerpt from the end of Chapter 2 and the beginning of Chapter 3 of The Art of Inquiry. Enjoy. * 2.6. Bewilderment, Redux So far, our itinerary has taken us a good ways: from our basic commitments (alive to X, fraught about Y) to a confrontation with our thinking in general to a space of possibilities.…
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Austen’s ethical vision of wholehearted love
My essay on Jane Austen can now be read at World and I. Typical among Austen readers and academic scholars is the claim that she was keen to cast a critical eye on genteel society, and yet she entertained no thought of going beyond its inequalities and class distinctions. My suggestion is that this nay-saying–the satirical…
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Whither moral education?
Abstract “In “Whither Moral Education?,” (World and I, November 2011), I argue that American education has for far too long set aside the questions of the good and the meaningful–or, what is the same thing, the moral and intellectual virtues. First I attempt to identify what factors gave rise to this phenomenon and then in the final pages to explore how…
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Wendell Berry on the proper education for young people
The following is an excerpt from Wendell Berry’s “Thoughts in the Presence of Fear,” Orion Magazine (Autumn 2001). The article was published shortly after September 11, 2001. As far as I can make it, we have made little progress on devising a “proper education [that] enables young people to put their lives in order.” My friends and…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 