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Posted on April 20, 2023 Leave a Comment
‘Not speaking and speaking are both human ways of being in the world’ explains Paul Goodman in his altogether wonderful but sadly out of print work, Speaking and Language.: A Defence of Poetry But, continues Goodman, ‘there are grades of each’. Just as there is speech to hold a family together, a sophist’s speech to […]
Posted on November 16, 2022 Leave a Comment
When done well, philosophy does two things: it shows how two similar things are actually rather different, and it shows how two different things are actually rather similar. This is an essay about the second class of philosophy. We generally think of cooking, gardening, dancing, painting, building, parenting, and writing as having nothing in common. […]
Posted on April 8, 2022 Leave a Comment
To live virtuously, we need look no further than the garden, for it is the most steadfast and honest of teachers. Through the act of gardening, we learn humility, patience, kindness, empathy, and commitment; and likewise receive an antidote to the vices of arrogance, impatience, selfishness and hubris. I Kneeling down in prayer in front […]
Posted on January 20, 2022 Leave a Comment
Looking up at the stars, I know quite wellThat, for all they care, I can go to hell,But on earth indifference is the leastWe have to dread from man or beast. How should we like it were stars to burnWith a passion for us we could not return?If equal affection cannot be,Let the more loving […]
Posted on January 9, 2022 Leave a Comment
Looking in the mirror, you probably say to yourself in particularly self-hating moments that you aren’t normal. Everyone else seems able to hold down a job, maintain emotional equilibrium, and manage healthy relationships; it is you, and you alone, who are singularly cursed to abnormality. If only you could change, be different, be normal… But, […]
Posted on December 25, 2021 Leave a Comment
‘We are in the habit of imagining our lives to be linear’ writes Katherine May in her work Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times. We imagine ‘our lives to be a long march from birth to death in which we amass our powers, only to surrender them again, all the while […]
Posted on December 19, 2021 Leave a Comment
We should be nicer to those we care most about than a complete stranger. After all, these are the people who we have made an implicit promise to embrace and care for. Yet, oddly enough, this isn’t always the case. In fact, we inflict far greater malevolence, insult, and injury to those we care about […]
Posted on November 14, 2021 Leave a Comment
The Mobius strip is a surface with one continuous side and one boundary. It folds in on itself with its opposite poles revealing themselves as the same side. It isn’t like a coin, which has two sides. On a coin, they really are opposites of one piece, but on a Mobius strip, they are one […]
Posted on October 26, 2021 Leave a Comment
Philosophy, especially in the West, tends towards the abstract and complicated. This website is dedicated to the pursuit of recapturing philosophy from these distant and often incomprehensible heights and bringing it back down to Earth. Raw material for philosophy isn’t just found on dusty library shelves or exclusive journals. It can be discovered in everyday […]
Posted on October 13, 2021 Leave a Comment
Even though it comprises no more than two letters and one syllable, ‘no’ ranks among the most punishing words in the English language. Contained in this very tiny word is a universe of potential meanings. When we run away from the possibility of being told “no”, we are often running away from something entirely different. […]
Proper Candor 