The Wisdom Series...

inside The Study...a conversation of possibilities

The Ghost of Knowing...

It is also odd to even bring up the question of what is knowledge. It’s ubiquitous; we take it for granted. If anything, knowledge belongs to that mysterious aspect called mind about which it is only known that it is not physical matter. We have become content to live with a ghost all around us. Our interest has focused on its validity, on its truth as if refers to the material, rather than on it itself. This amounts to having chosen to argue about which ghosts are good while being able to move our focus away from the fact that we are living with them...Jake Keenon

From The Study-a conversation about possibilities

    

A Common Humanity-thinking about love

Love takes many forms, some of which are in tension with one another and some of which are in tension with morality. The reasons why love commends itself to morality are also reasons why it offends it. Moralists will try to resolve this tension by moralising our understanding of what love really is and by declaring Othello's passion to be many things but never love. If they were to succeed in denigrating all love that conflicts with morality as false love, then they would undermine what is best in our morality— the faith that human beings are precious beyond reason, beyond merit and beyond what most moralisers will tolerate.

Raymond Gaita...
A Common Humanity


Common Humanity is a beautifully written book about how the humanity of our fellow human beings is sometimes not fully visible to us. Drawing on the examples of the Holocaust, the David Irving Affair, the case of Mary Bell and the taking of children of mixed blood from Aboriginal parents in Australia, Raimond Gaita examines the reasons for this. Amongst them, he argues, are a moralistic conception of morality that runs deep in our culture and an impoverished conception of reason and understanding. Both encourage a false opposition between moral judgement and compassion and between head and heart.