Marcus, Wal-Mart, pickleball
All things go, all things go.
“Philosophic Guide”
A signboard from a movie.
Sluggo, philosophe
Sluggo channels, kinda, sorta, Montaigne.
Cogito
I overthink, or at least I think I do; therefore, I am.
More 1232 Madison
In 1926, Lawrence Buermeyer, who taught philosophy at New York University, resided at 1232 Madison Avenue, where he was soundly beaten by his friend Joseph Carson, who taught philosophy at Columbia University.
Gorgias in our time
“The orator need have no knowledge of the truth about things; it is enough for him to have discovered a knack of persuading the ignorant that he seems to know more than the experts.”
Pete Buttigieg and Seneca
I think Buttigieg must be describing the Penguin Great Ideas paperback On the Shortness of Life (2005).
Being 97
A short film about Herbert Fingarette, philosopher.
James D. Wallace (1937–2019)
When Mr. Wallace was a brand new professor, students actually threw rocks at him, mistaking him for a fellow student sufficiently geeky to carry a briefcase.
Senecan advice for travelers
“Do you want to know why your running away doesn’t help? You take yourself along. Your mental burden must be put down before any place will satisfy you.”
Senecan advice for liberal-arts types
“I devoted myself to the liberal arts. Although my poverty urged me to do otherwise and tempted my talents towards a field where there is an immediate profit from study, I turned aside to unremunerative poetry and dedicated myself to the wholesome study of philosophy. . . .”
“It wears a person out”
Mrs. Fosdick offers an addition to the philosopher H.P. Grice’s principles of conversation. From Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Fir.
Meow?
“If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.”
Nancy, philosophe
Nancy is right there with Blaise Pascal.
Stanley Cavell (1926–2018)
Stanley Cavell on watching tragic drama: “Now I can give one answer to the question: Why do I do nothing, faced with tragic events?”
The sense of wonder
Joseph Pieper: “To perceive all that is unusual and exceptional, all that is wonderful, in the midst of the ordinary things of everyday life, is the beginning of philosophy.”
Politics and theory
If I doubt the reality of Donald Trump’s lost “great” America, it’s not because of “critique.” It’s because I’m aware of too many elements in our history — call them facts — that contradict any simple claim to greatness.
Destruction, degree by degree
Getting rid of philosophy, etc. The present (manufactured) budget crisis in Illinois offers an easy excuse for “flexibility,” really another name for destruction.
On ambition
The philosopher Mark Kingwell on ambition.
Quandaries 101; or, why I wouldn’t reschedule an exam because of a ballgame
I would invoke a remembered-from-a-philosophy-class version of Kant’s categorical imperative.
Mich wundert, das ich so frelich bin.
Wonderful, compact philosophies of life.
I can’t get no satisfaction
From William B. Irvine’s A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy.
Stoic-colored glasses
From William B. Irvine’s A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy.
Grice
“When I was in grad school, in the mid-1980s, reading lots of ‘theory,’ the Dickensian name Grice was much in the air.”
Michael Oakeshott on higher education
How to know when a university has ceased to exist.
“Give her a little Rimbaud”
From Route 66: “Be the intellectual. Change of pace. She’ll never see it coming. It’ll dazzle her. Tell her you’re an existentialist.”
More Wittgenstein
Michael P. Lynch replies to Paul Horwich.
“Was Wittgenstein Right?”
Paul Horwich on Ludwig Wittgenstein: “[T]he usual view these days is that his writing is self-indulgently obscure and that behind the catchy slogans there is little of intellectual value. But this dismissal disguises what is pretty clearly the real cause of Wittgenstein’s unpopularity within departments of philosophy.”
Marcus Aurelius on Maximus
Do you know a Maximus?
Frankfurt on bullshit
Philosopher Harry Frankfurt: “For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false.”