by Daniel A. Kaufman ___ A venerable strategy in arguing against theism involves the observation that the world looks exactly as you’d expect it to, if there is no God and not at all like it should if there is one. I want to say the same thing here about moral life and traditional moral theories. Moral life looks nothing […]
by Daniel A. Kaufman ___ I want to do something a little different in these Course Notes. Rather than focus on a single text or issue, I’m going to talk about three interesting lines of conversation with students that developed in two of my courses, over the past two weeks: Introduction to Philosophy and Philosophical Ideas in Literature. Plato – […]
By Massimo Pigliucci My friend Dan Kaufman, over at the Electric Agora, has written a nice compact piece arguing that the Aristotelian view of eudaimonia — the life worth living — is significantly more defensible than the Stoic one. (Except, as even Dan acknowledges, when things aren’t going well and people live in times of turmoil. Which, one could argue, […]
by Daniel A. Kaufman It is no secret that my friend and colleague, Massimo Pigliucci, is a practicing modern Stoic. Indeed, working within and promoting the modern Stoic form of life has become one of his chief projects, including a blog devoted exclusively to the topic – How To Be a Stoic – and a very well-received and popular book […]
by Daniel A. Kaufman I want to talk about a certain metaphor in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. It appears in a lone sentence in Book III, Ch. 3., and while mentioned only briefly, it is significant, not just in understanding the Ethics, but in grasping a crucial point about the limits of reason and deliberation more generally. [T]he end cannot be […]
by Daniel A. Kaufman Reflection on the explicitly moral commandments in the Decalogue raises a number of interesting considerations, in the area of Ethics. I am thinking, specifically, of the following (translation is the 1985, Jewish Publication Society’s Tanakh): You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. One thing to note is that when translated […]
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