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On Being Someone Who Has Something To Say
Being ‘someone who has something to say’ is a pre-requisite for any serious discussion. Without it, there’s a danger that anything said might be ‘mere words’. When Plato explains this requirement, he describes it as a harmony between logos and bios: your words align with your actions; your understanding is shown in your way of life. You say what you are and you are what you say. When there’s a disharmony in these things, it undermines what you say and, more importantly, who you are to say it.
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The Doctor and the Donut Seller
Imagine you’re a doctor: all you want is to heal the patients in your care. Your place of work, your hospital, in a drive for profitability (forced by a withdrawal of government support) is taken over, first partially but then as a majority share, by a company that makes donuts and sugary soft drinks. At […]
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On the Failure of Public Philosophy
What we see today, in philosophy’s public lack of stature, is the end result of a downward slide that started 40 years ago when the balance was tipped against a certain idea of what a university is and ought to be.
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Reflections on ‘The Lives of Animals’
In the morning I’m on the farm as an extra pair of hands while some young cattle are being de-horned. In the afternoon I’m reading J.M. Coetzee’s ‘The Lives of Animals’ for the first time.
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‘Stay-At-Home Dad’
It’s not difficult to explain why so few men take on this role; relative to women, I mean. My brief experience has made it very obvious and I can and will list the reasons for you. In short, in contrast to women, a man in this situation is repeatedly made to feel like there is something wrong with him.
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Too Good to be Happy: A Paradox for the Good
Justice is a part of our idea of goodness, unequivocally. But having a sense of justice makes you sensitive to injustice. With this sensitivity, any injustice is liable to make such a person miserable. And there doesn’t seem to be anything good about being miserable. That seems to me to be a paradox of goodness, whereby something unequivocally bad comes from something unequivocally good. Justice is good, and happiness is good, but having a sense of justice makes us less happy. Having one good seems to deprive us of another. I wonder what the solution to this puzzle might be.
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What is Good Philosophy?
At any given time, philosophy is what philosophers do. Look at what philosophers do; look at the picture of success for philosophical activity as it is in this time. You might be disappointed by what you find.
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What is a Pseudo-Intellectual?
What is a pseudo-intellectual? This is a bad question, full of shit, but, like shit, mostly better out than in.
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Believed by the Wise: Socrates, Pragmatic Arguments, and Pascal’s Wager
I’ve been wrestling with an aphorism that I can’t pin down. I want to say this: ‘The wise believe what is good and true, the clever only what is proven.’ But I can’t. The tone may be right, but the content is wrong: or rather, not wrong but factually inaccurate.
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Cynicism, Joy, and Baloo the Bear
I don’t often speak about joy; I think it’s silly. (I don’t know why I think this.) But recently I’ve been troubled by troubles of my own making, and this coincided fortuitously with my daughter’s discovery of Disney’s The Jungle Book and with that Baloo the bear. What a picture of a Cynic: contentedly resting at ease with just the bare necessities. It’s a healthy correction.
An experiment with philosophy as a way of life
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