Busy busy. Reading about animal minds (teaching a class on it in the spring, and realized too late that there was a vast learning curve I needed to start climbing immediately; expect animal minds posts in the future). Finished a paper on "Humility and Environmental Virtue Ethics," which will be coming out in the future in a volume on applied virtue ethics, edited by my colleague Mike Austin. I must give a particular shout out to Tommi Uschanov for bringing my attention to Aldous Huxley's essay, "Wordsorth in the Tropics." This provided the inspiration for the above attempt to get at "ecological humility" from a slightly different direction than in my related paper by that title. Thanks, Tommi!!!
I'll also be presenting something of a prelude to my work-in-progress on patience at a couple small conferences in November. It's called, "Beyond Waiting: Patience & Moral Development." Comments welcome.
As above, I hope to have things to say here soon beyond merely tooting my horn. But if my son is any indication, there are pleasures to be had in tooting, too.
I'm glad that I can be of some use to you. I wish I had commented more on your recent "humility" stuff, but more often than not I have just found that I don't have anything original enough to say. But if I can contribute to your work by drawing your attention to the original thoughts of others, that's good enough.
ReplyDeleteThanks again, Tommi. I also enjoyed Huxley's essay on humility in Do What You Will and no have it on my list of things to do to read more about Rasputin (whose "humility" he contrasts with St. Francis).
ReplyDeleteSorry: "now have it on my list..."
ReplyDeletei'm going to STEAL your REFERENCES.
ReplyDeletei'm going to read your essays, too. but first i'm going to STEAL your REFERENCES.
j: do you mean that people (students?) are going to steal my bibliography...or that I just have too many references (or both)? or am I not getting an inside joke? (I hate to ask...)
ReplyDeleteor maybe I'm just reading too much into the all caps (uncharacteristic...so something must be up...)
ReplyDeletei, me, j., am going to take your REFERENCES to works on SIMPLICITY and HUMILITY and VIRTUE-ETHICS-BASED ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS... and follow them out to better understand my own present concerns about same.
ReplyDeletebut you're right to be WARY. who can say what is up with all these unusual ORTHOGRAPHICAL surprises??
Ok. I've just never seen you use all caps! Cafaro's work may be of particular interest to you: he's a Thoreau fan. (See his essay(s) in the first of the two volumes he and Sandler co-edited on environmental virtue ethics--the one published by Rowman & Littlefield.)
ReplyDeletethat's kind of what i thought; i think a friend has worked through his thoreau BOOK.
ReplyDelete