Here I share a project that my daughter undertook and fulfilled weekly, over 20 weeks, when she was 12 years old. To: Rebecca Stern From: Daniel Klein RE: VIRTUES PROJECT Each Wednesday, by 20:00, email me your written thoughts on the virtue of the week. Your written thoughts should include answers to the following questions. [...]
To correct their superior, inferiors must invoke another superior—a superior superior. Doing unto others as you would have them do unto you, or the golden rule, is an ideal of equality, as is the precept of loving your neighbor as yourself. In the highest view, we hope for humans to treat one another as equals. [...]
Suppose a man named Hutcheson lends ten pounds to a man named Smith. Then we might say, “Smith owes Hutcheson ten pounds.” Suppose that Hutcheson also teaches and aids Smith. Then we might say, “Smith owes Hutcheson gratitude/esteem/love.” Beyond Hutcheson, Smith might feel that he has been taught and aided by humankind generally, and Smith [...]
Love of one’s country stands better when it finds its office within a higher love. Lewis disaggregates ‘love’ into loves In his book The Four Loves, published in 1960, three years before he died in 1963, the Irish/Englishman C.S. Lewis says that, although goodness itself cannot turn bad, things that we associate with goodness and [...]
Born in 1729, Edmund Burke was in his twenties during the 1750s. Some of his notes from that period were collected in a slim volume called A Note-Book of Edmund Burke, edited by H.V.F. Somerset, published in 1957. An essay in the volume is “Several Scattered Hints Concerning Philosophy and Learning Collected Here from My [...]