Diamonds, Rust, and Nostalgia

A little over a week ago, my wife-to-be and I roadtripped out to Reading, Pennsylvania for the second concert we have made it to together so far.  My rather decidedly unacademic, surprising (to my colleagues and students) love for Heavy Metal -- I've written a bit about this previously on Orexis Dianoētikē -- for the straight-out hard-edged metal I grew up with and in during the late 70s and all the 80s -- overdriven bass, melodic but achingly distorted riffs, drum and bass fills, guitar solos (preferably in tandem), larger-than-life frontmen (or in the cases of Wendy O'Williams or Girlschool, frontwomen) -- metal that laid down its roots, and was communicated about in enthusiastic fan magazines before it was esoterically and eruditely distinguished into genres, discussed in dissertations.

We traveled out to see one of the last shows on the last tour of a band who earned their status as giants, as innovators and influencers back when we were listening to them on albums and cassettes:  Judas Priest -- lacking only one original member, K.K. Downing -- played an intense two-and-a-half hour set, preceded by Zack Wilde's vehicle Black Label Society, but more importantly (at least for us -- and probably more than half of the audience) by another seminal, hard-hitting, though sadly  attritioned-away (only two members from their heyday remain, and their original singer died a long time back) band: Thin Lizzy.

Whose Flourishing Ought We Be Concerned With? (part 1)

A very interesting question was raised recently in one of the LinkedIn groups to which I belong: "Whose flourishing ought we be concerned with?"  Given the nature of group forums -- both that they invite collaboration and dialogue between multiple interlocutors, and that any notions I might work out in detail there would have their readership confined to that group -- I decided the question would provide an excellent blog topic.  I've been working recently on a paper for an upcoming ISME conference on MacIntyre's virtue ethics and prison teaching, so the notion of "flourishing" -- a moral term and goal in virtue ethics -- has been on my mind even more than usual of late.

For those not (yet, or explicitly. . .  one can always hope!) virtue ethicists, here's in a nutshell the significance of what is being talked about in the discussion.  "Flourishing" is one of those somewhat quaint-sounding but actually quite apt terms by which we render a family of teloscertain not-so-easily- translated Greek and Latin terms -- Western virtue ethics goes back to those cultures -- like eu zein / bene vivere (literally "living well") or eudaimonia / beatitudo ("happiness").  Now, why bring up these terminological transformations?  They represent a continuity in a conception of the good for human beings.  In short, for virtue ethics, the Good is not a specific or generic good thing or a possession or enjoyment of such goods.  It consists in a certain way, a kind of pattern and shape, of one's life, one's relationships, one's actions and activities -- put another way, a progressive, ongoing, appropriate, and as full as possible realization of one's potentials as a human being.