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Virtues we write in water on a dissolving typeface
Sometimes I feel really old; there’s no other way to put it. I’m not just referring to my lack of fashionable clothes -I suppose they’re obvious- but apart from buying a new smart phone when there’s an appealing deal on offer, or having to replace my old MacBook Air even when there’s not, I suppose…
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What if the homunculus forgets?
Do you ever wonder who runs what? Who is actually in charge of things? If the workers in a large factory decided to lay down their tools and all production stopped, would the boss, or the foreman still be in charge -and in charge of what: a non-functioning business? Hierarchy only works until it doesn’t……
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If your heart is a volcano, how shall you expect flowers to bloom?
It seems like years ago now when I first read the thought experiment about the drowning child posed by the philosopher Peter Singer. I don’t remember the exact wording but the gist of it was: on seeing a child unable to escape from a shallow pond, you decide not to wade in to rescue it…
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I wear my rue with a difference
I have so many questions about things nowadays; maybe I always have, but perhaps the questions were held down, drowned beneath the sea that encircled my working life. In the days when I worked in a big city hospital, my life was hectic, so maybe my mind was hectic then as well. Retrospect is difficult…
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If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottages, princes’ palaces.
The older I get, the more I realize that knowing that is not the same as knowing how. When I attempt to describe knowledge in those terms the deficit is embarrassing. Surely one of the most important components of knowledge is not to be stored like a book on a shelf in another room. Years…
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You taught me language, and my profit on it is I know how to curse
I’ve been thinking about the theory of knowledge lately –epistemology. Well, perhaps more about epistemic harm, actually. Sometimes I wonder if it is more one of overthinking than anything else; even if it is a widely held belief, in retrospect the longer you consider it the less valid it might begin to seem; more exceptions…
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Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.
When I was young and growing up in a 1950ies Winnipeg school, it didn’t occur to me to categorize the unusual people I encountered there. There were those who seemed to behave themselves in class, and those who didn’t. I suppose there were variations among the disruptors: some -those who usually sat at the back…
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Why do we insist on asking Why…?
Now that I am retired and have been consigned to the less productive part of society, it has occurred to me to ask why we find it so important to question things -even things we think we already understand; even things which might be better left alone; even the value of the questions themselves… I suppose…
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What, can the Devil speak true?
There are times when riding in a bus can be like overhearing the goings-on in a Confessional Booth; I am not a Catholic, I hasten to add, but I’ve seen enough movies about Confessionals to feel I should have been. It’s not the priest’s advice for redemption that intrigues me as much as the similarity…
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