Photo: Sans soleil, dir. Chris Marker
Continue reading “The Poignancy of Things”Chris Marker’s Sans soleil exemplifies the journey to wisdom, without once mentioning that concept.
The Poignancy of Things
Tag: humility
Rethinking Liberal Education
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
In Praise of Small Sanities
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
Does Wisdom Lean Left?
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.
Who’s Afraid of Wisdom?
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.
What is Wisdom?
Photo: News Medical
Continue reading “What is Wisdom?”Wisdom as I understand it is a capacity for sound judgment with a view to pragmatic action. Wise judgment is attuned to cognitive complexities in the world and to the ways in which historical and cultural contexts inform diverse systems of value. Whatever their domain of action, wise practitioners evince high degrees of intellectual humility and empathy, together with a thoroughgoing commitment to fostering the well-being of both one’s self and one’s community.
A.Ham in the Age of Trump
Continue reading “A.Ham in the Age of Trump”Hamilton continues to resonate because it speaks, consistently and profoundly, to a deep hunger for wisdom in American society today.
Giving Up on Paranoia
Continue reading “Giving Up on Paranoia”Wisdom is a perfect antidote to the paranoid style of American political culture today.
Why Wisdom? Why Now?
Portions of this post first appeared in Inside Higher Ed and are reprinted here with permission
Continue reading “Why Wisdom? Why Now?”“I am wiser than he is to this small extent that I do not think that I know what I do not know.”
Socrates, in Plato, The Apology of Socrates