David Wynne Owen
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David Wynne Owen has not written any posts yet.
David Wynne Owen has not written any posts yet.
Thank you, good Sir. This is a remarkable piece of scholarship. These days, most higher education institutions would salute this as more than adequate for a Masters dissertation. You may, exercising your humility virtue, respond by suggesting that this is more about the decline of higher education, but try not to. It is a fine contribution, and clearly one that led you to rethink your assessment of this important virtue. As it did me. I guess good old temperance drops in, or should do so, whenever we have any unambiguous praise for, well, anything. I had considered being empathetic (and, importantly, empathic) as the key to the selflessness that seems to undergird... (read more)
For rather too many years, I have been slogging away at my own attempt to identify the virtues and then derive from them the actual duties, the specific actions, that we must carry out in order to warrant the adjective "virtuous". Once upon a time, I might have argued that because I am beavering away here at the end of the world (Tasmania), I can be excused for not knowing about your contributions on the subject, indeed about LessWrong. These days, that excuse seems just plain silly, an attempt to cover up a failure of scholarship.
Either way, I am enormously grateful for your posts. My initial focus had been on Andre Comte-Sponville's... (read more)
I am impatient, so shoot me, but would be delighted if you could post your always-valuable Notes on the candidate-virtue of poise. You listed it in your scary list of 88 candidates, but offered only a teasing list of potential synonyms/neighbors -- "confidence, grace, unflappability, authority, gravitas, refinement". While these offer insight into the ways in which we identify poise in another, I wonder if the term deserves a broader approach, especially if it is to join the Pantheon of other bona fide virtues. My own conception of poise is perhaps captured by the image of the raptor, high above its prey (or hoped-for prey, anyway), at almost stalling-stillness, ready to swoop,... (read more)