Tag: Life
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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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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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‘Oh, how this spring of love resembleth the uncertain glory of an April day which now shows all beauty of the Sun, and by and by a cloud takes all away’
Can we really speak from places where we are not; from times we have visited and then been forced to leave; pretend we still understand how it felt to be young? What truth can memories tell us of our lives…? Do we only remember the sharp edges of things: the significant comings and goings of…
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Most people are other people
Do I really have a true self? There was a time when it seemed obvious that I, quite apart from being an individual and not a replica of my neighbour, possessed a unique identity; or at least it was something that I would eventually have, because, as the philosopher Sartre wrote, existence precedes essence; I…
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Morality, like Art, means drawing a line someplace.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about morality for some reason; not that I figure I’ve entered its purview or anything, you understand -I don’t make a habit of climbing a fence where I’m not sure of my welcome now that I’m old and creaky. I suppose that, having only a few leaves left on my branches…
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Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing
Words are important, but sometimes it is silence that is more eloquent; often, to sit in silence takes courage, and yet it sometimes communicates more than sound. It allows the listener to anticipate and you, the speaker, to think; it is not always awkward… And yet, there are norms: whose turn it is to listen,…
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