“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
1 The unexamined life is not worth living does not seem true. We can be very hurt in friendships and relationships; we can fall to pieces when goals, large or s...
Category: philosophy
Susan Sontag: “No “we” should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people’s pain.”
I wonder how my best students make something special out of what I assign. I’m staring at an essay—the first chapter of Sontag’s Regarding the Pain ...
Plato, “Meno,” 70A-72A
I am using the Anastaplo & Berns translation. Plato’s Meno, tr. Anastaplo & Berns. Newburyport: Focus, 2004. In this lecture I want to address thr...
Notes on Craft: Francis Bacon, “Of Delays”
I want my writing in 2020 to demonstrate far more attentiveness to craft. How do writers create sentences their readers want to quote? How do they give them ima...
Strategies for Students Who Have To Write About Philosophy
tl;dr: 1) start personal 2) read around / think around–if it feels too narrow a topic, it is too narrow 3) they say, I say–find opinions to work wit...