music
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The Tuning-In Relationship (2023), Part 1
A few years ago I finally made good on a long-ago promise to look into a possible connection – at least a parallel, perhaps something more – between music and ethics. In a 2015 post on teaching my older child how to drive, for example, I wrote: I picked up on the connection between music… Continue reading
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Tradition and Innovation
I’m reading Michael Oakeshott’s 1962 essay, “On Being Conservative”, with my public policy class, today. I came across a passage which ties into the paper I’ll be serializing here, starting tomorrow morning. A musician may improvise music, but he would think himself hard done-by if, at the same time, he were expected to improvise an… Continue reading
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The Aims of Education
My approach to teaching could be described as “outcome-based education,” given the emphasis of my courses on helping students to develop particular skills of moral cognition. For me, this narrower, short-term aim has always been tied to a broader vision of the humanities, or of liberal education, or of human life in the world. It… Continue reading
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Knowing By Heart
I’m just back from a regular practice session with the Atlanta Open Band, a community contra-dance band of which I am the chief instigator and organizer. We ran later than usual because, just about the time we’d usually wrap up, I fell into teaching the band a new tune by ear. After practice, one of… Continue reading
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Some Notes on the Side
I’ll be attending the 2015 International Conference of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics, next month, in California. My presentation for the conference is a progress report on an collaborative project on hydraulic fracturing, about which I really will post some things this week. In the mean time, I’ve got something of an experiment… Continue reading
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The Music of Movement
Thinking about the convergence of ethics and music, I was reminded of a passage in Oliver Sacks’s A Leg to Stand On. The book recounts Sacks’s own experience as a patient, recovering from a severe injury to his left leg. He describes experiencing his leg as an alien thing, little more than a pillar of… Continue reading
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The Music of Systems
As I continue to mull over possible connection between ethical experience and music, I came across a passage suggesting that systems have a kind of music to them. I provided students in my environmental ethics class with a few excerpts from Donella M. Meadows’ very useful book, Thinking in Systems: A Primer. The last chapter,… Continue reading
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On Helping My Daughter Learn to Drive
I’ve noted already that things I learn in private life sometimes converge with what I’m thinking about in my professional life, and this morning brought an especially complex tangle of such convergences. (I am a practical ethicist, though, so I suppose some spill-over is inevitable. In fact, I used to observe that it’s very hard… Continue reading