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I think the philosophical interest in Lojong is in ideas about how moral development works. A lot of philosophers in the West take after Aristotle and think of moral development on the model of developing a skill. It’s almost taken to be a truism that the way to develop a virtue is by doing the actions associated with the virtue. You get to be a generous person by doing generous actions, a just person by doing just actions, and so on. I think Lojong puts pressure on this; it is a collection of techniques for developing morally important traits like compassion, selflessness, and kindness that doesn’t involve doing any of those actions. I think it offers a well-developed picture of how we can also cultivate virtue via imaginative practices that should be more central in how philosophers think about moral development in general.
Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Nicolas Bommarito.
Standardised mortality ratios (SMRs) allow for useful comparisons to be made against a national average, as the results take into account differing age structures in the populations of local areas.
Local authorities find these ratios useful to gauge how deaths in their area compare with England and Wales as a whole in a given year.
The North East had the highest SMR among the regions of England in 2014, with mortality levels 14 percentage points above the national level.
Mortality levels were lowest in London, at 9 percentage points below the national level.
In 2014, the local authority in England with the highest SMR was Middlesbrough (37 percentage points above the national level)
A found poem by Richard Marshall, illustrated by William Blake.
Hilary as a young man resisted World War II and became a Trotskyist. He later helped lead a movement in Cambridge against the Vietnam war, and, learning from his colleague Roderick Firth, wrote brilliantly on how to think about war. Even given that in close families rebellion by children is normal and has an edge, Sam’s initial response was harsh; his father threw Hilary out of the house (in addition to patriarchal abuse, there is no fine moral judgment here since Stalin had murdered Trotsky in Mexico not so long before and many others). When Hilary had a fever, however, his mom went and brought him home…
Alan Gilbert remembers his friend the philosopher Hilary Putnam.
The flânerie of the fox into the urban metropolis is a ‘fleeting’ shuddering; the gentle yet petrifying chaos during the quiet hours, the disorientating pangs of tongue that lick the night-time air, the sound that reverberates from the ‘chatter of a beggar’s teeth’ in Artaud’s words.
Samuel Stolton on Rowan Evans’s poetry chapbook, freak red.
In the current American climate, while Donald Trump lunges for the White House by ranting from platforms, screens, and newsfeeds against the women, the immigrants, the refugees who must be identical with his contempt for their differences from him, as if a word matched its referent, always without slippage, I talk to the dead. To two long gone, especially: to Virginia Woolf and Plato, their resonances stretched across the millennia separating them.
Spens asks a simple question: how do protest movements respond to the challenges and opportunities of the digital age; what tactics work, and which are counterproductive? By analysing modern anti-establishment movements, from Occupy and Anonymous to ISIS and The Tea Party, she questions whether the Romantic idea of protest is still relevant in the Twenty First Century, and what form the ideal protest movement would take.
Thom Cuell reviews Shooting Hipsters by Christiana Spens.
Inventing a literary form is an honor bestowed upon few. We may speak of Don Quixote as the “first novel,” or Emerson as the “father” of American poetry, or Augustine’s Confessions as the earliest example of autobiography, and enjoy doing so because it exercises our desire to create ranks, build consensus and celebrate true originality, even if we know full well that American poetry didn’t begin at any one point, nor was there a first novel. Still, this hyperbole is fun, and lists need to be made. So when it comes to the essay, it should be said that the verdict is essentially unanimous: it belongs to Michel de Montaigne.
Jared Marcel Pollen on Montaigne.
One main oddity in many post-Kantian and Anglophone discussions of Kantian autonomy has been that they understand it basically as just a matter of an individual acting rationally on principles of its own choosing. But Kant’s own notion of autonomy is not captured by the notions of individuality, choice, and rationality, for he stresses that people make individual rational choices that generally are immoral, e.g., merely prudent rather than respectful of the necessary equal value in the dignity of persons as such. Hence, common liberal endorsements as well as conservative or radical criticisms of Kant–for a stress merely on individual rational choice as such–are all fundamentally misguided.
Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Karl Ameriks.
I’d like to think that we can all be saved by story, at least temporarily, and it may not be a story in a book. It could be a story we overhear on the bus, or from a friend, or relative.
Tristan Foster interviews Idra Novey.
… asemic texts inspired by the work of the experimental CoBrA movement of the late 1940s and explore the impulses of hand and ink …
By Kate Wakeling.