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Do not argue about what a good life is: live it
You need to think well in order to live well, and coming to understand what it is to think and live well is the proper business of philosophy. The process of philosophy, with all its theories and methods and technical discourse, is necessary to gain this understanding, but it is not the final end of this activity. We should at some point leave it behind. […]
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My Last Lecture: Afterword
A commenter asked what made me say that ‘anyone who talks like this doesn’t belong in the modern university’? In that lecture, to explain something about what philosophy is and does, I naturally appealed to the intrinsic value of the discipline. But the measures of value in the modern university are all extrinsic and instrumental. That essential mismatch of what matters is what makes me say that this kind of view doesn’t belong in the modern university. It is out of place and out of time. […]
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My Last Lecture
I don’t have many recordings of myself lecturing, but one of the few that I do was captured just before the falling of the first in a line of dominoes that would ultimately lead me to leave academia. I view it now with a degree of nostalgia, because everything after this point would not be the same. In this introductory session, I found myself wanting to explain something essential about philosophy that I think has become increasingly difficult to see. But anyone who talks like this doesn’t belong in the modern university. […]
An experiment with philosophy as a way of life
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