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Learning, Participation and After Virtue
What makes a good person? This is an old and important question. Philosophers and theologians through the years have sought an answer including Aristotle, Aquinas, Hume, Kierkegaard, Newman, Nietzsche and others. Alasdair MacIntyre provides a useful analysis of the history of thinking on this question and the current state of moral philosophy in his books After Virtue (1984) and Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988). MacIntyre argues that a full understanding of moral philosophy today is constrained by failure to appreciate historical context. He proposes a disquieting scenario to illustrate what he deems the state of affairs today. Imagine, he suggests, through some terrible catastrophe all the scientists in the world…
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Learning about Thinking from James Joyce
In my view one of the best ways to study learning and thinking is to look to literature and in this arena one figure stands out for the manner in which he conveys the human thought process in print. I am of course referring to James Joyce. In this short review I present some aspects of Joyce’s work from the perspective of insights on how we think and learn. My argument is that great literature resonates with our thought processes. In reading Joyce we are provided with a working model of the inner structures and mechanisms through which we experience the world. I approach this analysis from the perspective of…
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My Philosophical Development by Bertrand Russell
I am reading a wonderful book called My Philosophical Development by Bertrand Russell – I picked up a 1959 first edition in a wonderful second hand bookshop, Trinity Books in Carrick On Shannon. This is like a beginners guide to Russell by himself and, in it he traces his thinking down through the years.There is a particularly poignant section where Russell reproduces copies of his notes from his teenage years. He writes (p280): Just before and just after my 16th birthday, I wrote down my beliefs and unbeliefs, using Greek letters and phonetic spelling for the purposes of concealment.What Russell was at pains to conceal at this young age were…
