Peter Starr on Wisdom and Culture
Continue reading “The Smile of Oneness”A worldview that sees the world as perfect at every moment through a coincidence of opposites and an insistence on absolute simultaneity leaves no place for action in the world, specifically in the pursuit of social justice.
Photo: The Times of India
Continue reading “Journeys to Wisdom”The early history of wisdom unfolded on the road.
Stephen Hall, Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience
Photos: The Oberlin Review, Penguin Books
Continue reading “Holding the Self Lightly”Language has adhesive properties…, drawing us together by enabling us to share our stories…. By inviting us into another’s skin, novels encourage us to practice empathy. And good novels celebrate the myriad complexities of individuals by creating ample room for all characters to have a voice.
Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being
Photo: Atonement, dir. Joe Wright
Continue reading “The Novel as Atonement”It wasn’t only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter into these different minds and show how they had an equal value.
Ian McEwan, Atonement
Photos: The New Yorker, Penguin Books
Continue reading “The Death of Old Goriot”Rastignac gives up on his chance for wisdom, but Balzac clearly holds out hope, against considerable odds, for his implied reader.
Continue reading “The Many Ages of Wisdom”Picture in your mind a wise man or wise woman. Chances are you imagined someone of advanced age—Dumbledore not Harry Potter, The Matrix’s Oracle not Trinity.
Photo: Raphael, The School of Athens (detail), antigonejournal.com
Continue reading “Rethinking Liberal Education”Narrative imagination is an essential preparation for moral interaction. Habits of empathy and conjecture conduce to a certain type of citizenship and a certain form of community: one that cultivates a sympathetic responsiveness to another’s needs, and understands the way circumstances shape those needs, while respecting separateness and privacy.
Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity
Continue reading “In Praise of Small Sanities”No wise liberal has ever thought that liberalism is all of wisdom…. Liberalism isn’t a political theory applied to life. It’s what we know about life applied to a political theory.
Adam Gopnick, In Praise of Small Sanities
Continue reading “Does Wisdom Lean Left?”Wisdom does not “lean left” so much as “lean liberal.” If wisdom has a party, it is the party of philosophical liberalism and its historic fellow traveler, liberal education.
Photo: ChatGPT 5.2
Continue reading “Who’s Afraid of Wisdom?”Before moving on, I would like to address five ways in which contemporary readers—and academic readers most especially—might be uncomfortable with wisdom as an optic for literary analysis.