Avital Ronell's Examined Life

Examined Life is a collection of various forms arguments from numerous philosophers on a range of topics Cornel West on the nature of truth and the courage to examine oneself, Avital Ronell discuss the limits of meaning, Singer speaks on applied ethics and consumption, Kwame Anthony Appiah on cosmopolitanism, Martha Nussbaum on justice and disability, Michael Hardt on the meaning of revolution in the US, Žižek on ecology, human waste and artificiality, and Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor on disability/impairment and the limits of individualism in America. In the first section of this paper I will attempt to classify each of these argument into the four type of arguments that Wilhoit’s presents in “A Briefs Guide to Writing Academic Argument” he explains four different types of academic arguments. Proposal arguments in generally speaking has 2 parts: a problem and a solution section (Wilhoit, 2009, p.240) in examined life I find two instances of this type of argument, Ronell’s “Meaning”, Singers “Ethics” and Martha Nussbuam’S “Justice” , in the following paragraphs I will attempt to support this claims with reason from the text and movie of Examined Life. Avital Ronell questions the impulse to assign meaning to everything and how this derived meaning gives us our sense of being and our ability to live and act ethically. She states, “I feel that some people might be …show more content…
He believe the problem is that we put more value in the items that we accumulate than in human life. To illustrate this idea he give the example of a child drowning in a pond and askes if you would be willing to save the child with a pair of $1000.00 shoe on, most people would say of course, and then quite seamlessly he sneaks in his solution, than why not use the money that was spent on unessential items given to an organization that help child in poor and under developed country (p.