tradition
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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 3
The third installment of “Practices and Practices in Human Moral Development” is the most direct extension of the “Tuning-In Relationship” paper, building on the connection between music and ethics. III. Practices Part of human sense-making arises from participation in shared ways of doing things. We more readily “tune in” with others who are participating in… Continue reading
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Practices and Practicing (2024), Part 1
Following hard on the heels of “The ‘Tuning-In’ Relationship” was a second paper on the intertwining of human music-making, human social life, and moral development, this time with an evolutionary twist. In particular, I pick up from and/or expand upon the last section of the previous paper, on practices. There were some loose threads I… Continue reading
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The Tuning-In Relationship (2023), Part 5
And now, at last, the conclusion to my 2023 paper, “The ‘Tuning-In’ Relationship in Music and in Ethics.” I’ll let it speak for itself. Practices An appeal to embodiment may be necessary to account for the tuning-in relationship, but it is not sufficient. Gestures and other bodily cues that mean one thing in one context… Continue reading
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The Tuning-In Relationship (2023), Part 4
Digging deeper into the phenomenology of making music together and thence to the phenomenology of social life, the next section of my 2023 paper concerns embodiment. Making music together is something we do as living beings of a species with a peculiar history, a species with a distinctive way of experiencing our own embodiment. Does… 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 Greatest Weight
As I wrestled with disorientation on my way back from Ohio, earlier this week, I recalled something that could serve as a counterweight, helping me to keep my balance and so to avoid sliding into regret and dwelling on what could have been. I first gave serious attention to the work of Friedrich Nietzsche in… Continue reading
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Citizens of Nowhere
Preparing for a class session on Aristotle’s virtue ethics, I came across a passage in Alisdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue that gets to the heart of the idea of my recent post, “Ethics for Exiles.” It concerns the role of friendship in ethics and in political life. Friendship of course, on Aristotle’s view, involves affection. But… Continue reading