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Television

Call the Midwife

Ellen Miller considers birth, wonder, and care as philosophical frameworks.

When I was an undergraduate I heard numerous times that I should think of philosophy as a boxing match: set up the argument, knock down your opponent’s arguments, set up your argument again, knock down the counterarguments to your position… We should keep attacking until our strongest points prevailed.

Looking back, I’m surprised I found this attractive. After all, I had spent most of the previous years in a ballet studio setting up pirouettes and grand jetés. Even though ballet dancers are tougher than many people assume, the ballet studio is hardly a boxing ring. I’m sure the physicality of the metaphor appealed to me, and the suggestion that the abstract linguistic world of philosophy had a competitiveness to it was intriguing.

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