Category: Philosophy as a Way of Life
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The Big (Soul) University
The entire existential project behind Karl Jaspers’ Idea of the University involves integrating a professor’s research with students’ search for their own selves. The Socratic teacher turns his students away from himself and back onto themselves; he hides in paradoxes, makes himself inaccessible. The intimate relationship between student and teacher here is…
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Aphorism 05Oct2015
Either I risk myself venturing into the world and beyond—or I never will have my ownmost Self as freedom
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A Fixed Idea by Amy Lowell
What torture lurks within a single thought When grown too constant; and however kind, However welcome still, the weary mind Aches with its presence. Dull remembrance taught Remembers on unceasingly; unsought The old delight is with us but to find That all recurring joy is pain refined, Become a habit,…
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Neoliberalist Humanities
It is not the humanities per se that are under attack. It is learning: learning for its own sake, curiosity for its own sake, ideas for their own sake. It is the liberal arts, but understood in their true meaning, as all of those fields in which knowledge is pursued…
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Philosophy Majors Out-Earn Other Humanities Grads
It’s been said in many places before: A degree in the humanities isn’t exactly marketable to employers (less kind critics have called those degrees “useless”). But there’s one humanities major whose graduates are doing quite well in the job market—and it’s philosophy majors. Source: Philosophy Majors Out-Earn Other Humanities Grads…
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Lost art of speaking to a mass audience
According to [John Armstrong, University of Melbourne] the way [the professionalization of the humanities] all got started was an accident of history that divorced the humanities from a mass audience. “They were set up without any concern for marketing because when they were set up they reflected the dominant elite…
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@nihilist_arbys: the perfect lunch for #anarchocynicism
Laugh at the absurdity of #consumption… let your laughter be the soundtrack of living from #Oblivion2Oblivion. Welcome to Arbys. Can I help you? JK. No one can. Which dead animal would you like to waste a few minutes of your useless life eating today? — Nihilist Arby's (@nihilist_arbys) June 30, 2015
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Yes, Your Opinion Can Be Wrong
The worst phrase to show up in any discussion: “It’s just my opinion.” Is your opinion informed with cogent facts? It could very well be right. And more than likely, you will not preface the statement with “It’s just my opinion…’ Is your opinion something you pull out of your…
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The nerd’s guide to learning everything online
When I meet youth who have gaps in their education about American or World history, American or World literature, or the basics of science, I recommend them to find John Green’s Crash Course project with this brother, Hank. Fill in some of those gaps, and have a good time doing it. Indeed,…
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Buddhism and Psychedelic Methods
Austin Hill Shaw examines the nature of creativity, cosmology and psychedelic communion. Shaw practices in the Vajrayana Buddhist tradition, “taking refuge in the Buddhist path” since 2002. Rather than seeing the use of psychedelic substances as antithetical to a Buddhist practice, Shaw considers them as a powerful, “occasional”, means for…
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From “Remediation” to “No Excuses”: The Indignity of Deficit Thinking | the becoming radical
While apologists for Southern heritage remain unable or unwilling to confront the blatant racism of the Confederacy, many today remain nearly universal in our inability or unwillingness to recognize and then confront racism, classism, and sexism in the form of deficit thinking. Deficit thinking, as Stephens represented, is imposing onto groups…
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Project Vox
Project Vox concerns the next major scholarly development: the acknowledgement that a number of early modern women have been unjustly ignored in our narratives. From Lady Masham, Margaret Cavendish and Anne Conway in England to Émilie Du Châtelet in France, many women played significant roles in the development of modern…
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Hacking Education Begins with Good Habits and Practical Knowledge
I often talk with youth (here and here are some examples) about how what they are doing in high school and/or university may not be giving them everything they need. There are lot of ways, however, that the system can be used to provide opportunities to get the basics that…
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‘Why Grow Up?’ by Susan Neiman
@aoscott reviews Why Grow Up? Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age. the present and its technological lures and discontents, thankfully, are not really [Susan Neiman‘s] concern, any more than the jeremiad is her chosen form; she comes across as a patient pedagogue rather than an angry scold. She sprinkles in a few…
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For Consideration: Sales Pitching
Ideas are not offered for slow consideration anymore so much as they are offered for quick sale. That thought came to me this morning while watching a documentary. I don’t really think it matters what the film series was… this was something that had been building for a while and it…
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Karl Jaspers as Interdisciplinarian
A very solid piece on the interdisciplinary nature of Jaspers’ psychopathology as well as the connection of his first great work on the embodied mind to his later existential and historical works. As the managing editor of the Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity (2nd Ed., forthcoming 2016), I often have had…
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Occupying Space
A man should be so poor that he is not and has not a place for God to act in. To reserve a place would be to maintain distinctions. Meister Eckhart quoted in Merton, Thomas. Zen and the Birds of Appetite. A New Directions Book, 1968, 26. iBooks. I am…
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