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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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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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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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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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Parenting a Toddler: An Illustration of Wittgenstein’s Distinction Between Saying and Showing
Wittgenstein’s distinction between saying and showing can be seen, very simply, in how we raise our children. It is important. I hold it in mind at all times.
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Product and Purpose
Some people fail to see a distinction between the product of an activity and its purpose. This isn’t always and everywhere a failure to see things as they really are, since sometimes there is no distinction to be drawn. But when it is a failure it can lead to serious consequences. Because what follows from it: to come to define something’s purpose by its most visible product and then measure its value in those terms.
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Attend to What Matters: Introduction
‘If I attend properly I will have no choices and this is the ultimate condition to be aimed at.’ (Iris Murdoch) I believe this to be true; and if it is true, then it is very important. Possibly few ideas in philosophy are more important, since in this idea you will find the ultimate aim and purpose of philosophy, and in that something that points to the finest way that a human being can live.
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If You Want to Improve the World, Improve Yourself
Everything that is good in life can be made bad by being used badly or put to bad purposes. Many things that are bad in life can be made good by being used well or put to good purposes. The goal in life is not to get more good things, or avoid bad things, but to use all things well. The goal is not to have more of what is good but to be more of what is good. That is why we say: if you want to improve the world, improve yourself.
An experiment with philosophy as a way of life
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