A tale of two grannies We like to talk about lifelong learning, and a lot of what we say — aspirational though it may be — leaves out the important part, which also happens to be the hard part. My two grannies illustrate this tendency: They were both “lifelong learners,” but what their love of […]
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Confession of a Rational Animal
There’s a lot to appreciate about Aristotle’s definition of our species as rational animal. We are animals with the capacity for reason — including the all-important ability to guide our decisions and behavior through the exercise of reason. I’ve devoted much of my life to practical reason and the pursuit of excellences that enrich our […]
Continue ReadingManaging Reason Fatigue
There have been a number of articles in the news about the growing anger of vaccinated people at the unvaccinated, confrontations about masks and social distancing, and of course, plenty of expert advice that shaming, scorn, and insults do not generally move people to be “responsible.” Behind all this lies what I call “reason fatigue”: […]
Continue ReadingRumors of excellence
I’ve been thinking about excellence for a long time, and one aspect of this rumination has been listening to the way people think and talk about excellence. It seems we have two common perspectives on excellence, and each of them miss something essential about striving for excellence — what I call excellencifying. It’s hardly a […]
Continue ReadingPanpsychism, part 2: privileged access
In my previous post about panpsychism, I talked about postulates that allow us to engage in knowledge-making in certain domains. For instance, the assumption that the laws of nature that operate around our neighborhood operate everywhere: While this postulate is required for us to engage in science, it can’t be proved by science — for […]
Continue ReadingPerforming language
I’ve had a few questions about my Pronouns post, and I want to take a moment to clear up a possible confusion about “performing.” In English, the word perform has various connotations, of which we can differentiate two main themes. When actors perform a part, they are, to be crude, pretending to be someone they […]
Continue ReadingKant Got This Right
As I often say, the mistakes of a great philosopher are worth the philosopher’s weight in gold. Kant said plenty of things to object to, but one thing Kant got right is that we can’t get free will and the laws of nature to play nicely together (at least not the current laws of nature […]
Continue ReadingThe Universal Solvent
When I was a naïve, novice psychotherapist, I had the good fortune of a psych hospital’s support to attend professional conventions, partly to learn, and partly to represent the hospital. I remember my first psychoanalytic convention: I was thrilled to sit in the presence of famous psychoanalysts, soaking up their wisdom. I was at just […]
Continue ReadingTimidity
Deliberative humility can be conceived as a “mean between extremes,” which implies a continuum. At one end, we’ve seen what we might call deliberative arrogance, but what’s at the other end of the continuum? We don’t really have an adequate word for it, so I’m co-opting the word timidity — though diffidence usefully captures another […]
Continue ReadingHumility
As we saw in the introduction to the Everyday Excellence challenge, deliberative humility is one of the basic excellences of mind. Superficially, this is the excellence of being open to the possibility that we don’t have all the answers. But if we don’t have all the answers, then what should we do?On this first day […]
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