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?
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 “Let This Book Give You Heart”Lastly, if you should ever doubt that a series of dry words in a government document can shatter spirits and demolish lives, let this book erase that doubt. Conversely, if you should be of the conviction that we are powerless to change those dry words, let this book give you heart.
Louise Erdrich, The Night Watchman
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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.
Continue reading “Slow Reveals”At a time when white masculinity has driven what Barbara Tuchman called “the persistence of unwisdom in government” to new depths, narratives like Mbue’s and Nguyen’s could not be more important, nor more welcome.
Continue reading “Empathy and Irony”But then along comes “Behold the Dreamers,” a debut novel by a young woman from Cameroon that illuminates the immigrant experience in America with the tenderhearted wisdom so lacking in our political discourse.
Ron Charles, The Washington Post
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Continue reading “The Poignancy of Things”Chris Marker’s Sans soleil exemplifies the journey to wisdom, without once mentioning that concept.
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Continue reading “Journeys to Wisdom”The early history of wisdom unfolded on the road.
Stephen Hall, Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience
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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