Document Type

Article

Publication Date

Spring 2023

Abstract

What distinguishes philosophy is its attention to reality and sense as such, or what is traditionally called being and essence. As a result, philosophy as a way of life is, most fundamentally, not directly a matter of doing one kind of thing rather than another outside the classroom but instead of how we live with respect to our being. Enacting our being in one way rather than another inflects whatever it is we do, wherever we do it, even if none of the content of what we then do involves the content of philosophy. Consequently, if we do nothing in engaging philosophy but study it in the traditional, apparently unlived way in the classroom, we are in active relation to our being, and this is fully living philosophy as a way of life. We need, then, to reconceive conventional classroom philosophy as itself not primarily an intellectual exercise but an exercise of being. The essay elaborates on this point and its consequences for teaching philosophy.

Comments

This is the Author’s Accepted Manuscript. Copyright © 2023 Philosophy Documentation Center. All rights reserved.

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