About

“Peripatetic” in the title indicates my excitement over fresh readings of Aristotle freed from old prejudices. “Postmodern” particularly recalls Robert Brandom’s recent and very nonstandard use of this term for a sort of Hegelian synthesis of the best of ancient and modern values.

I write about serious philosophy in a semi-popular way, aiming to show its relevance to life while addressing substantive issues of potential interest to specialists. The focus of my interest lies in meta-level interpretation in ethics and the history of philosophy.

While presented in blog form, this is really a sort of spiral development of a larger whole.

Posts are often repeatedly edited after publication. Individual posts vary a good deal in length, and in the amount of context they assume.  I try to use links to help explain things I mention, and avoid repeating myself too much.

Within individual posts I often aim for an almost haiku-like brevity, which requires compromise of the best standards of careful, fair, and explicit philosophical argumentation. My hope is that the emerging larger whole increasingly provides support for the many things that are left implicit on any one occasion. Recently I have also experimented with some much longer posts on texts, but I expect to continue to produce many short ones.

Some posts have a high density of quotations that might be deemed unusual. For long I’ve found it personally extremely illuminating to go through the process of selecting key excerpts from a work I am interested in, and then manually transcribing them. This process of physically interacting with a text invariably yields new insights and precision, even with material I have read a great many times. A few posts are nothing but quotes; some are just my thoughts. But I enjoy the literary form of commentary that includes the text commented upon. And as this effort has grown over time, commenting on specific texts has helped provide focus and a greater precision of thought.

This effort began with minimalist sketches of core Aristotelian concepts as viewed through my own personal prism, along with a relatively undisciplined engagement with the work of the living American philosopher Robert Brandom, who was the one who finally convinced me to take Kant and Hegel seriously. These were woven into a series of aphorisms on ethical life, human subjectivity, and various disputed orienting topics for a reading of the history of philosophy. My belated initial encounter with the main works of Paul Ricoeur started an evolution toward inclusion of more extensive textual commentaries. Lately, I’m finding more common ground between plausible readings of Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel than I ever expected.