In his essay “What is Enlightenment?” Immanuel Kant proposes that to achieve enlightenment, one needs the freedom to make public use of their reason. Any such summary statement would run the risk of misunderstanding Kant’s position if we overlook the significance of the public itself. Kant defines public as a universal space potentially shared by all human beings, and private as a local and situational space specific to practical concerns. The public is a place…
I have selected ten excerpts from Oliver Burkeman’s book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. The book is a series of meditations on time and how we relate to time. What makes the book engaging and enlightening is Burkeman’s decision not to answer off-the-shelf questions about time management, but instead to treat our common problems about time as symptoms of deeper problems. He invites us to think about time, to question our desires about…
The following passage is about professional philosophy and its relation to human experience, but it applies equally well to academic psychology. Don’t we learned, similar to the student James talks about in this passage, to expect an absence of relationship between psychological science and our personal realities? [The student] began by saying that he had always taken for granted that when you entered a philosophic class-room you had to open relations with a universe entirely…
I am writing this after going through Books VI and VII of the Confessions of St. Augustine. I think various parts of the Confessions could be understood and connected in light of understanding what it means for a truth to be embodied or personified. The parts I have in mind include (a) several episodes where other people make an impression on Augustine and (b) Augustine’s appeal to Christ (toward the end of Book VII) as…
This is the second installment in my series of reading key philosophical texts. It seemed appropriate to follow the reading of Plato’s Republic with the Nicomachean Ethics. This text is an incredible place for intellectual training, for training of our attention. It is an exercise in the art of noticing what is relevant in a given judgment. My overview is an invitation for you to read this great work. If you decide to read it,…