Posts from the ‘Philosophy’ Category

Jan 18

Friendship, Part II: Aristotle and Romantic Friendship

Cross-posted from Genetic Method.

In my last post on friendship, I responded to my friend Ashley Vaught’s questions about the role of proximity in friendship in Aristotle.  I  consider some questions there about whether virtue friendship is possible when we are still on the way to becoming completely virtuous.  I was left wondering how we can ever become virtuous if we need friends to become virtuous but we can’t be virtue friends before we are completely virtuous.  Perhaps it isn’t just that friendship is impossible, but rather that our friends who help us become virtuous must be more virtuous than we are.  One possibility is that virtue in Aristotle unlike in Plato can be partial and always underway since virtue is practiced and requires a practice of ethical perception which is then limited based on our individual habits of seeing.  Against the view that friends become virtuous and then become capable of having complete and virtuous friendships with us, I think that Aristotelian virtue friends make us have more complete virtue because together we can see better, ethically speaking.  It is not lost on me that my exchange with Ashley over friendship in Aristotle illustrates how friends help us see more and better.  I appreciate the meta-ness of that more and better being about how friends help us see more and better.

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Jan 12

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Friendship, Part I: My friends, there are no friends.

Cross-posted from guest blogging appearance at Genetic Method.

My friend Ashley Vaught sent me a long inquisitive email about teaching Aristotle on friendship. Let me just say to start that I really don’t like thinking about, writing about or teaching Aristotle on friendship. When I teach the Nicomachean Ethics, I rarely teach the friendship bits. I have always wondered what the philosophical point was. And as someone interested in how political life is foundational for Aristotle, I have bristled at readings that maintain that Aristotle’s account of friendship implies a pre-political ethical life. Moreover, I’ve never understood what the purpose of this account was except just explaining more about friendship. And what is the point of that? Do people read this and start pursuing more complete friendship? I can just picture someone sitting down and graphing her friendships to judge which friendships are complete and which are for pleasure and which utilitarian, I don’t know, to keep things organized? I don’t think it makes me a bad friend to not enjoy theorizing about friendship. But I do think good friends respond to their friend’s serious inquiries, so when I got a long email from Ashley about friendship in Aristotle, I agreed to have some thoughts. Read more

Nov 30

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GLCA Ancient Philosophy Workshop Storify

On November 20, 2014, we held Ancient Philosophy Workshop 2014, sponsored by the Great Lakes Colleges Association.  Students from Earlham College, Antioch College and Wabash College presented papers and students and faculty responded.  We were thrilled to have Dr. Jacob Howland, McFarlin Professor of Philosophy at University of Tulsa, speak on “City of Pigs, City of Men: Divine Measure in The Republic’s ‘True’ and ‘Healthy’ City.”

View the Storify of the event #GLCAnct14 here.

Nov 13

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Policing Philosophy’s Borders No More

Four stories:

1.  At a conference several years ago I found myself in an argument with a philosopher who works in an area of philosophy commonly dismissed as not philosophy.  We were considering the claim a third party had made that a fourth party’s work was not philosophy.  I agreed that the third party’s claims were dubious, “But,” I asked, “Don’t you think we need to make some distinctions between what is or is not philosophy?  Otherwise the original and specific contributions of philosophy will be disregarded.” Read more

Oct 31

#SPEP14

Last weekend, the annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, the umbrella organization for continental philosophy in North America was held in New Orleans.  New Orleans is a fantastic city.  I had never visited before, so I had an impression that was kitschy.  But I left thinking it was beautiful.  I stayed in the Garden District.  My first morning there I took the streetcar to the conference hotel and the driver of the streetcar got out of the streetcar and went into a hotel and was gone for five minutes.  As a friend said, “Union break, don’t h8.”  The city was loud and colorful and much better than anything I had ever learned from The Pelican Brief about what the city would be like.

SPEP was all a-Twitter® and I storify it here.  In this post, I want to give a more sustained consideration to two panels I attended, two papers in particular: Sara Brill’s “Beyond Zôê and Bios: On the Concept of Shared Life in Aristotle’s Ethics” and Robin James’ remarks at the Advocacy Committee’s New Media, Social Networks and Philosophy panel.* Read more

Oct 16

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Object Oriented Phiasco

The quickly burgeoning philosophy blogosphere has made it possible for philosophers to have more low-stakes discussions and debates not only about their work, but about the field.  In my view, this has largely been a good thing.  I live in small town in Indiana.  Up until about fifteen months ago, I lived in deep south Texas.  Sometimes the philosophy world feels far away.  I’m glad to be able to see what other people are thinking about and to engage, sometimes just as a voyeur, in these discussions and debates.  I’m also invested in digital humanities and the idea that we can lower the barriers that prevent non-academics from participating in these engagements. Read more

Oct 1

The Danger of Justice Done OR Why We Need a Bad Conscience

It’s been a hectic couple weeks in the various institutions that concern my life.  The discipline of philosophy reached a boiling point and some well-respected important philosophers finally said enough is enough and organized some collective action to put a stop to some pretty unethical behavior.  Leigh Johnson has blogged an Archive of the Meltdown if you want to read more about it.  And Wabash has been actively responding to some pretty serious issues that needed to be addressed at the same time.

I’m glad for these actions, but I’m worried, too.  I think there is a danger when we do what is just to congratulate ourselves a little too excitedly and to let that congratulations become an avenue for contentment and self-satisfaction.  I was reminded yesterday of a point Jacques Derrida makes about how our acts of hospitality and justice are–I want to go further and say must be–accompanied by a bad conscience.  Derrida recognizes that when he feeds the poor or gives a place to stay to someone in need he is leaving out all the other hungry and all the others with no place to lay their heads.  Responding to one Other gives that Other precedence over all the other equally demanding Others to whom we are responsible.  To suppose that we are good in these moments leaves out two important things: a) that our act was too little too late, almost inevitably and b) that there is still more to be done. Read more

Sep 8

The Gods Must be Crazy and So is Nature

I asked my students to write a paper explaining how Zeus in Hesiod’s Theogony is a model of what a standard for nature is, what such a standard reveals about Hesiod’s view of nature or “the way things are”, and what is difficult about establishing a standard for how things are. I decided I would do this assignment, too, to give them a sense of what I am looking for and for an opportunity to continue blogging about Greek mythology. Read more

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  I'm Chair and Associate Professor of Philosophy at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana. I work on ancient Greek--mainly Plato and Aristotle--and contemporary European philosophy inflected by social and political concerns. I'm particularly interested in the concept of nature and how historically nature, understood in relation to its apparent opposite of reason, nature, and artifice, has led to conceptions of community that require a founding exclusion. My first book argues that Aristotle's Politicsdraws on a conception of nature that is not opposed to these things and thus not exclusive. My second book considers Aristotle's conception of nature in his account of generation to show the ways that form and matter seem interdependent in the model of a Möbius strip.

  I am serious about running. I care about justice, feminism, opposing racism and resisting neoliberalism. I think Socrates was on to something when he suggested thinking was a practice of living. I teach students to think--and to live. I delight in the pleasures of doing the difficult thing.

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• Aristotle on the Nature of Community

  

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