Author: Julian Baggini

The Virtues of the Table

Books

How we eat, farm and shop for food is not only a matter of taste. Our choices regarding what we eat involve every essential aspect of our human nature: the animal, the sensuous, the social, the cultural, the creative, the emotional and the intellectual. Thinking seriously about food requires us to consider our relationship to nature, to our fellow animals, to each other and to ourselves. So can thinking about food teach us about being virtuous, and can what we eat help us to decide how to live? All this and more in my new book.

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Should we be more stoic?

The Shrink and The Sage

Of course, we can adapt and borrow any particular Stoic methods that work. But that no more makes you a Stoic than practising meditation makes you a Buddhist. Like any philosophical position, Stoicism itself stands or falls – or more likely limps along – on the soundness of its arguments, not its effect on our psychological wellbeing.

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Should we embrace change?

The Shrink and The Sage

Heraclitus is famous for one simple and powerful aphorism: you cannot step into the same river twice. Everything is in flux, nothing remains the same. And what was originally an observation about nature has now become an imperative. We must innovate. The technological revolution is without end. If it’s not new and improved, it’s old and obsolete.

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