evolution
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Practices and Practicing (2024), Part 6
And now, at last, the conclusion to “Practices and Practicing in Human Moral Development.” VI. Postscript on the Practice of Mimetic Pedagogy So much for the formal conclusions of this brief investigation of human moral development through the lens provided by Merlin Donald. Questions remain, of course, especially concerning how a “mimetic pedagogy” might actually… Continue reading
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Practices and Practicing (2024), Part 5
The heading of this installment declares it to be the conclusion of the paper, but this isn’t the last installment of “Practices and Practicing in Human Moral Development.” A postscript – or maybe a coda? – is yet to come, with some initial thoughts on what a “mimetic pedagogy” for ethics might look like. V.… Continue reading
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Practices and Practicing (2024), Part 4
IV. Practicing Throughout his account of moral virtues, Aristotle (2002) often falls back on analogies with more immediately familiar kinds of human endeavor. On the way to his first definition of the highest good, for example, he considers what might be the work – the fundamental, species-defining task or function – of being human by… Continue reading
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Practices and Practicing (2024), Part 2
The framework for the paper derives from the work of Merlin Donald, who identified three broad stages in the development of human cognition, characterized mimetic, mythic, and theoretic modes of memory and representation, respectively. Philosophers tend to preoccupy themselves with the theoretic mode, sometimes with a dash of the mythic or narrative mode, but how… Continue reading
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On Sleeping through the Night, Part 1
Continuing the serialization of my recent manuscript – “On Sleeping through the Night: Ecology, Economy and Ethics of a Vital Human Project.” – with the first main section. 1. The Peculiarity of Sleep as a Project As far as we know, all – or very nearly all – animals spend some fraction of their lives… Continue reading
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Sleeper Project
Please pardon the pun – well, really, a double pun, though that may not be obvious just yet. Read on to see what I mean. How did I come to be writing a paper about, of all things, sleep? It’s the convergence of threads which have been running through my research, some of them stretching… Continue reading
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Of Stone Tools and Sustainability
In some of my earlier blog posts I began to toy with the idea of exploring a parallel or an affinity between music and ethics. It’s not that music makes us ethical or – as Plato supposed – that certain kind of music might draw people toward virtue or toward vice. It is rather that… Continue reading
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Darwinian Humanism
In honor of Darwin Day 2015, I would like to revisit an odd paper I had published in Environmental Values in 2007, titled “Darwinian Humanism: A Proposal for Environmental Ethics“. I would here like to offer a few – I hope tantalizing – excerpts from my final typescript. In hindsight, it was an odd and… Continue reading