Author: John Poplett
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Plato’s Phaedrus and the Paideia of Søren Kierkegaard
In the summer of 2022, a friend invited me to join a discussion group which gets its jollies reading and discussing Plato’s dialogues line by line in minute detail. Before long it became obvious to me that I had entered the gates of heaven though I was much more alive than dead. Old pockets of…
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Conversation with ChatGPT on Kierkegaard’s Concept of Time or The BOT Thinks I’m a Moron
Here in this transcript I test my wits with ChatGPT. Not only is the robot smarter, it’s more polite. PART I JOHN I am writing an essay on the concept of time in the thought of Søren Kierkegaard. My thesis is that chronological time is mostly irrelevant, more like a distraction, from his perspective. In…
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Oversharer’s Delight: A “Brave and Beautiful Story”
Got a call from Maureen Muldoon one day in January. I pitched her a story for the Voice Box storytelling series she runs with Cathy Richardson. There came a pause in the conversation. I had mentioned something about a recent, embarrassing little dust-up, why I don’t know. Naturally, that’s when Maureen asked me to backup…
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Living Poetically According to Kierkegaard
The Romantics believed in the ideal of “living poetically.” Today many people believe in the notion of the self-made person. Kierkegaard is suspicious of these kinds of ideas. What are his objections and concerns? The expression “living poetically” connotes a libertine, a person who marches to his own drummer, follows rules of their own whimsical…
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On Revision and Jack Kerouac
On George Saunders’s Story Club, a fellow clubber remarked on “the illusion of natural genius”. It reminded me, by way of contrast, of Edison’s “1% inspiration, 99% perspiration” axiom. Some authors may be good at their craft but they’re also often good or even better at creating the “illusion”. Jack Kerouac comes to mind. It’s…