A Surprising Route to the Best Life Possible

"… It is a great and underappreciated talent — the capacity to be seized. Some people go through life thick-skinned. School or career has given them a pragmatic, instrumental, efficiency-maximizing frame of mind. They live their life under pressure, so their head is down; they're not open to delight, or open to that moment of rapture that can redirect a life. Others have a certain receptivity to them..."

David Brooks 

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/27/opinion/persistence-work-difficulty.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Is Agnes Callard Making You Uncomfortable?

"...The reason Socratic ethics—or Socratizing, as Callard verbs it—hasn’t been more widely taken up, she thinks, is that it’s an intellectualist theory, and most of us are aversive to intellectualism. Though accustomed to thinking of myself as a thinker, reading Callard I often felt as the Neanderthals must have on encountering Homo sapiens—Is all this thinking really necessary? My nonphilosopher brain began to seize from epistemological overdrive when Callard spent roughly four pages elaborating every possible implication of the question, 'Where are my keys?'”
...
https://newrepublic.com/article/190778/agnes-callard-philosopher-uncomfortable-questions

Gandalf

He has a point.

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

AI nightmare

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/3/10/2308654/-Cartoon-Greetings-citizen

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

"Delightful pessimism"

He found delight in earthquakes too.

"Perry recalled William bringing home a volume of Schopenhauer and reading “amusing specimens of his delightful pessimism.” It is perfectly characteristic of the volatile William James that he later came to loathe Schopenhauer’s pessimism, which he took as equivalent to determinism, and that he came rather delightedly to abuse the author of The World as Will and Idea. Schopenhauer’s pessimism, James wrote twenty-five years later, is “that of a dog who would rather see the world ten times worse than it is, than lose his chance of barking at it.”

"William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism" by Robert D. Richardson : https://a.co/6NdhLig

Parthenon at Sunset

https://www.threads.net/@rawelementproductions/post/DG29LxuJUyy?xmt=AQGz3-IF5IVRSPXm4i1mZnyWGacZ-zPzrG6FuL7SRpHXjA