Peter Starr on Wisdom and Culture
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Continue reading “Wisdom Matters: Reading Literature for a Wiser World”Some moments in human history are clearly wiser than others. In politics, and in social life more generally, ours seems strikingly unwise.
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Continue reading “Epilogue: AI Reads Me”You are an academic writing a critique of the conception of wisdom outlined in Peter Starr’s blog at Wiscult.com. What are the principal shortcoming of this conception and how would you suggest rectifying them?
Continue reading “Wisdom in Community”In short, what Alison Bechdel says of the essentialist/anti-essentialist debate applies to wisdom as well: “Clearly, [we] need to rethink this thing.”
Continue reading “The Wisdom of Fun Home in the Age of AI”If wisdom requires that we not take ourselves too seriously “as the center of everything,” then it is appropriate to ask whether the absence of self-mockery in both the generative AI essays and our work as literary critics does not mean that they, and we, fall short of wisdom as Bechdel sees it.
Portions of this post first appeared in Inside Higher Ed and are reprinted here with permission
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Continue reading “Reading for Wisdom Today”Cultivating intellectual humility initiates a virtuous circle, the result of which is a greater capacity for wisdom in all its dimensions.
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Continue reading “The Wisdom to Know the Difference”God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Reinhold Niebuhr, Serenity Prayer
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Continue reading “A More Novelistic Approach”We do not usually associate wisdom with beginners, but here is a new writer endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers.
Chinua Achebe, “Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie”
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Continue reading “Something Else Stands Beside It”What is both unfortunate and unjust is the pain the person dispossessed is forced to bear in the act of dispossession itself and subsequently the trauma of a diminished existence…. The psychology of the dispossessed can be truly frightening.
Chinua Achebe, Home and Exile
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Continue reading “Trauma and Community”Certain kinds of trauma visited on peoples are so deep, so stupefyingly cruel, that—unlike money, unlike vengeance, even unlike justice, rights, or the good will of others—art alone can translate such trauma and turn sorrow into meaning, sharpening the moral imagination.
Toni Morrison, Roundtable on the Future of the Humanities in a Fragmented World
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Continue reading “Simply Human”It is only by seeing ourselves as fundamentally other—the contingent product of a culture that has no particular monopoly on truth—that we can come into our wisest possible, most “utterly human” selves.