Tuesday, June 10, 2014

We must SIT, to think?!

I've found my bete noire. He's The Thinker.
The specific association of philosophy with walking, which features so prominently in Gros’s book, is itself a middle-sized thought worth looking at a little harder. We call Aristotle’s philosophical school Peripatetic because legend holds that he liked to walk about as he lectured, but the name may simply be a corruption of the school’s original nickname, derived from the peripatoi, or colonnades, of the Athenian Lyceum. Aristotle’s fondness for travel—born in Stagira, he was an outsider in Athens who ventured away on numerous occasions, most famously to tutor the truculent Alexander the Great—may also have been a factor. There is no internal evidence that his ideas are rooted in walking, except in the general sense that he believed in observation of the natural world as a prerequisite for science.
Even solitary philosophizing may prove less amenable to the stroll than we often imagine...
We must eventually cease walking, if we are truly to think." 
Challenge accepted. I'm going to go walking, to think about that.

Bright Stroll, Big City - The Chronicle of Higher Education

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