So, last week I went to the Cranlana colloquium - Sunday afternoon through to Friday. Aiming to support the development of wisdom in leadership, the readings and discussions were about ideas of the good life and the good society - extracts from Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, the whole (I think) of Antigone, bits from most of the canon of political philosophy (Hobbes, Locke, J S Mill, Marx, Rawls) and a range of other important political thinkers in the broader sense (Adam Smith, Milton Friedman, Amartya Sen, Edward Said, Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Luther King), and a few others introducing or dealing with key ideas (particularly in relation to morality and power), including a Le Guin short story ('The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas') and extracts from Huckleberry Finn and The Grapes of Wrath.
Many of the ideas and writers were already familiar to me, but it was good to read (and then discuss) the whole lot in such a concentrated form and period of time - some new perspectives on what it means to try to be a good person and to make the world a better place, and a reminder that so many of both the big questions and our day to day actions and decisions can be articulated in terms of some basic problems and assumptions (as organised thematically by the course: 'the good society', 'power and self interest', 'the nature and origin of justice', 'economic justice', 'freedom and dissent' and 'ethics and the individual').
Many of the ideas and writers were already familiar to me, but it was good to read (and then discuss) the whole lot in such a concentrated form and period of time - some new perspectives on what it means to try to be a good person and to make the world a better place, and a reminder that so many of both the big questions and our day to day actions and decisions can be articulated in terms of some basic problems and assumptions (as organised thematically by the course: 'the good society', 'power and self interest', 'the nature and origin of justice', 'economic justice', 'freedom and dissent' and 'ethics and the individual').
