Breathe Normally

In recent decades, more and more empirical studies have established the benefits of breathing. It may be hard to believe that something we do anyway can become a powerful tool for improving well-being, but that’s exactly the conclusion of many studies. For instance, a 2021 study in India involved teaching healthcare providers “SKY” (Sudarshan Kriya […]

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Deliberative Empathy

There are two distinctive features of Aristotle’s ethics that are useful for us, and it so happens they are also key to understanding Aristotle’s “science of happiness.” First, Aristotle focuses not on character as some fixed and immutable quality, like temperament. Rather, his emphasis is on the development of character through the deliberate cultivation of […]

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Balancing Act

Taking a cue from Aristotle’s Doctrine of the Mean, I talked about humility as a balance between too much confidence, which produces deliberative arrogance, and too little confidence, which produces timidity. We can generally recognize the extremes when we see them (and especially when we encounter them in dialogue), but it’s a lot harder to […]

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Timidity

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 […]

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Humility

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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