This is another good book I am reading by Mary Midgley, a British moral philosopher. Anyway, she is really good at giving the big picture of issues. She makes a compelling case for the value of philosophy and academia in general, defending it against those, including its practitioners, who find it irrelevant. She basically argues that much of how we view the world, the common sense approach, originated from academic, philosophical discussion. She shows how some of these ideas are so entrenched, like the idea of the autonomous, free individual, that we need other philosophical ideas, like community and human interdependence which haven't really be worked out as fully, to balance them out. Anyway, I have been pretty skeptical about the value of what I am doing lately and so this provided some nice context and justification. After all, society doesn't pay for that many people to do what I do. Both the value of history and learned about other cultures provides us new ways of thinking through these issues. Also, it is just an interesting exercise to think about how we move back and forth between micro and macro level concepts as we navigate through our lives. Although it is important to occasionally pull back and try to rethink things from a macro level, if you're doing it all the time, it can be kind of debilitating (which I find myself doing.) Lately I wonder why on an existential level I am Tokyo now, as opposed to say, Samoa, mainly just because its cold and I haven't been getting enough nature. But in several more immediate contexts, it makes a lot of sense to be here now and its actually a lot of fun. The pictures are from Ikeda park, from a walk we took Sunday morning.
