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What are you reading? May 2, 2025 [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-05-02
In WAYR?, I note what I’m reading and comment...you note what you are reading and comment. Occasionally, I may add a section or a link related to books…
I am finished reading:
Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers by Kwame Anthony Appiah - This is my second reading of this book for WAYR, this one was a more intense reading of the book and Appiah’s philosophical claims and arguments.
The first time I read this book, I was slightly disappointed because Appiah seemed to place so many limitations on the word; he says only used “cosmopolitanism” in the title because he lacked a better word that described his specific ethical concerns.
I’ve used the word “cosmopolitan” since I was a teenager more as an aspiration (there goes that Agnes Callard again!...and yes, that is on the TBR pile) for myself than anything else; an aspiration that I have not realized yet. This was before I knew the philosophical meanings of the word and its rootedness as a concept and even a way of life going back to antiquity.
I highly recommend this book and its case studies. I’d like to do some sort of study group about this book, in fact, and, IMO, such a study is even more imperative now than it was 15 years ago when it was first published.
It’s that I think that Appiah is more right than wrong about the limitations of the term that’s a disappointment to me. I’d like to reclaim the term from its current use as a pejorative.
Those we think of as willing to claim that not everyone matters— the Nazis, the racists, the chauvinists of one sort or another— don’t stop with saying “Those people don’t matter.” They tell you why.
Cosmopolitanism is about intelligence and curiosity as well as engagement.
I am reading:
How to Think Like Socrates: Ancient Philosophy as a Way of Life in the Modern World by Donald J. Robertson -
Genet: A Biography by Edmund White
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