One River: Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest, by Wade Davis. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996) In 1941, when I came to America, movies cost eleven cents and ran continuously. My very first taste of these day-long joys in the dark was a zombie movie, some low-budget avatar of The Night of [...]
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/partiallyexaminedlife/PEL_ep_120pt1_6-26-15.mp3 Dr. Eva Brann recently wrote an important book, Un-Willing: An Inquiry into the Rise of Will’s Power and an Attempt to Undo It (2014), which asks certain questions regarding human will: What is the will? Is it an obvious thing that we all can see in ourselves when introspecting? If so, then why is there so [...]
“Better late than never” is the motto of this review. The work known as Kant’s Opus Postumum occupied him during the last fifteen years of his working life, from 1786 to 1801. (He died at 80 in 1804.) The first English translation, which underlies this review, was published in 1993. The first German printing began [...]
When Professor Rosemann invited me to this colloquium—small in scale, but to my mind great in significance—I told him that I conceived my talk on Dennis Sepper’s newly published Understanding Imagination as a sort of book review, which earned me a wonderful possession, a copy of this magnum opus, as he called it, rightly. There [...]
Master and Commander and The Ionian Mission, by Patrick O’Brian The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories, by Cynthia Ozick I want to commend to the attention of the community a pair of books that belong to a series, and a collection of stories. The series and the collection are connected by nothing but their incongruity. Among [...]
As far as I know, a sense of guilt was not a recognized affect in the pagan world where about forty-nine percent of my moral allegiance lies; otherwise, I would apologize to you—apologize for being about to suggest to you a way of life, a way that may not jibe with your purposes and plans [...]
At every moment of this present life, our readiness to learn was, and is now, up to us, was and is our responsibility, and on every day our life breaks around the before and after of a life-changing choice… though all the past choices ease or obstruct the present one. Our cosmos, the place of [...]
Statesmanship is concerned with the virtues of justice, temperance, courage, and wisdom. Education in the city should be set up so as to cancel political ambition Cicero famously said of Socrates that he was the one who brought philosophy down from heaven to earth. This must be some other Socrates than the one of the [...]
Stewart Umphrey’s “Complexity and Analysis” proves that there is honest originality—the kind that makes straight for the origin but by a unique route. It shows an independence of mind whose distinctiveness verges on eccentricity—the kind that reaches the center by leaving the mainstream, whose perspective rouses thought by being a little askew, by shifting the [...]
Philosophy can come from a cool, sober sense that the ways of the world should be exposed and explained, its myths dismantled and its depths made plane; that not what is best but what is individual, not what is common but what is ordinary, should preoccupy our efforts. My subject, as proposed, is “Plato’s Theory [...]
Tonight I want to state, and even to overstate, what I believe to be a truth about the Program of St. John’s College. What makes the truth worth considering is that it goes against the plain appearances and against what people, quite understandably, say about us. I want to state this truth especially for the [...]
I am very much alive to the fact that this is Homecoming weekend—homecoming not only for the alumni but also for me. I’ve been gone from St. John’s far and long—as far as Delaware and as long as a year. So I look on the place where I’ve spent exactly half my life as an [...]
I am going to lecture on a work largely autobiographical, whose hero is a charlatan and whose author is therefore the same. This is not my own but the author’s opinion of himself. My lecture will therefore be an inquiry into the nature of the essential charlatan—an enterprise in the spirit and tradition of Plato’s Ion. [...]
Plato’s dialogue Gorgias ends with a long speech culminating in a rousing cry by an aroused Socrates. He is speaking to Gorgias’s student Callicles about his swaggering opinionatedness and their common uneducatedness. The words he uses are neanieusthai, ‟to act like a youth,” to behave like a kid, and apaideusia, ‟lack of teaching,” ignorance. And [...]