Category: Philosophy
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infused also with insistence, perdurance, determination
To some, the very notion of a virtue of pessimism may seem absurd. For instance, we may subscribe to Hume’s notion that the mark of any virtue is that it is useful and agreeable, either to the person who possesses it or to others. But surely pessimism is neither useful nor agreeable. It is not…
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on those who cry wolf
Apropos of everything at once and nothing in particular, I found myself thinking this morning—not for the first time—on the interpretations we have of fables and mythical archetypes, and how they don’t always stand up when you think a bit harder about them. One might argue that this is just a limits-of-metaphor issue, and yeah,…
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the chasm between our self-conception and our actual behavior
At THR, a brief bit on moral and ethical clarity under conditions of war by Alan Jacobs: The full implications of our involvement in a truly global economic order have long been invisible to us, because such invisibility has been in the interests of those who most profit from that order. Over the next few…
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a recurring theme in literary and cinematic history
This piece by Megan Marz at Real Life references a lot of (contemporary, literary?) fiction that I’m completely unfamiliar with, but in the context of a phenomenon I am more familiar with, and very interested in, as both a writer and a human being: the slipperiness and perpetual redefinition of the word story. The whole…