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Like everybody else, I am an inhabitant of this planet; and I am a member of many other smaller communities too. I am an American citizen, for example. I was made a citizen from birth retroactively by the US government after World War II when babies born to US servicemen and German women were declared […]
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In addition to the medical and economic aspects of the current crisis, the psychological challenges it poses have over recent weeks increasingly claimed our attention. Even if one is not affected personally, how does one cope with this crisis mentally? How does one deal with its consequences in everyday life, with the anxieties and concerns, […]
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When I’ve been on holiday in a foreign city, I’ve always enjoyed wandering around aimlessly in its public spaces, getting to know them in a wholly unsystematic and haphazard way, and even in Cambridge, where I have lived and worked for almost thirty years now, part of my day, unless the press of work was […]
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An emergency is defined not by the inherent badness or dangerousness of a situation, but by what we make of it. To call something an ‘emergency’ is to declare that something can and must be done about it – even at the cost of significant disruption to everyday life. Things judged to be beyond our […]
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The most important virtues in our present situation are undoubtedly patience, self-restraint, and forbearance. Yet none of them is contained in the catalogue of virtues in Aristotle’s ethics (see Nicomachean Ethics II 7). This is not because his assessment of the conditions of the good, active human life is particularly optimistic or because he does […]
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I knew in mid-February that we might be quarantined, and so I stocked up on essentials that became rare later. I knew in early March that economic catastrophe was imminent. My foreknowledge didn’t surprise me; I bet in early 2016 that Donald Trump would win the presidency, to the mockery of my friends from whom […]
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I am seventy-nine years old and I have Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis. It is a pretty severe lung disease and, until recently, if you developed it, make sure your will is in order and you might think about pre-arranging your funeral. It was fatal in a couple of years or so. Now, thanks to a very […]
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There is an image, associated with the covid-19 pandemic, that I am unable to forget among the countless reports of the crisis one encounters every day in newspapers and online. It is not an image of suffering or devastation but of something both more hopeful and, viewed from a certain perspective, more provocative. The picture […]
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