This is the Humanities Commons entrance to the Long Road, a website designed to give digital voice to my attempts to live a philosophical life.
Many will arrive here with a preconception about philosophy–that it is a an abstract, intellectual discipline divorced from the messy world of embodied existence. In fact, however, philosophy has been from its beginning a specific way of being engaged in and with the world.
Socrates, of course, has long embodied the manner in which philosophy has understood itself to be an engaged, dialogical activity. In the Republic (at 435d and 504c-d) Socrates suggests that the search for justice involves “a longer road” undertaken over the course of an entire life. The philosophical life for which he advocates is a lifelong endeavor oriented by an insistent desire to integrate the pursuit of truth, justice and beauty into our relationships with one another and the world in which we live.
In a world that we all too often experience as false, unjust and ugly, the “longer road” of which Socrates speaks is made at once more difficult and more urgently necessary.
On cplong.org you will encounter my attempt to put a philosophical life into practice with my family, my students, my academic and professional colleagues and the wider world in which we find ourselves.