Entertaining questions requires wisdom, a considering, reflecting frame of a mind still resonating with past experience but now focused by desirous expectation. Otherwise put: Questions are a mode of blessed ignorance, a thorough apprehension of our own cognitive limitations which clears our minds of mere opinions and, while it prevents us from reaching for personal [...]
The vivid love-speeches of the Symposium come to us, reach us, through several layers of incomplete remembrance, and as though from a mythic past. Symposium (or Drinking Party) by Plato, translated and edited by Eva Brann, Peter Kalkavage, and Eric Salem (Hackett, 2017) Why hast thou nothing in thy face? Thou idol of the human [...]
We want to give our students a classroom in which inciting books are talked about not as mere literature nor as historical documents, but boldly as they meant themselves to be taken: as the Word of God, or the insight of the intellect, or the wisdom of the world. And yet we want these same [...]
Is “the knowing of what one knows and what one does not know that one does not know” ever possible? And what is the benefit of that knowledge? Profound Ignorance: Plato’s Charmides and the Saving of Wisdom by David Lawrence Levine (Lexington Books, 2016) Plato’s Charmides is not one of the more famous dialogues or [...]
So there are, at least in my experience, not many books that deal with the question “What’s the good of justice?” But there is one that deals with it preeminently. It is the mother of all books on constitution-making, on governance and education, on psychology, on the routes of moral decline, on the role of [...]
Ludwig Wittgenstein is the only non-fiction writer I know whose outlook on life is systematically—and rousingly—askew of mine. Still, we should consider what value his way of seeing and speaking holds. Fat Wednesday: Wittgenstein on Aspects by John Verdi (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2010, 270 pages) I’ll reveal my own predilections and aversions up front: [...]
John Paul II’s “Fides et Ratio” is an act of daring: not only an exhortation to professional philosophers to return to foundational rationality, but an invitation to all and sundry to realize their natural philosophical capability. I find this call absolutely remarkable, not only as a Magisterial pronouncement for the faithful, but especially as an [...]
We live in a country in which liberty is both exercised and preserved by free action. Such action is by its very nature preceded by thought, from which it follows that human beings, the young especially, ought to have a period of reflective learning as a prelude to both private and public action. Editor’s Note: [...]
We want to give our students a classroom in which inciting books are talked about not as mere literature nor as historical documents, but boldly as they meant themselves to be taken: as the Word of God, or the insight of the intellect, or the wisdom of the world. And yet we want these same [...]
When the ancient philosophers speak of the philosophical life, one thing is immediately clear: It is a life and not a profession of which they are speaking. For the life of philosophy seems to have one reason for being—the search for truth. By “the permanent part” of the College in the title of my address, [...]
Our tradition may be in dire need of resuscitation and recollection, and it seems quite possible that the Chinese may help us in our necessity. Sour Sweet by Timothy Mo (288 pages, Sphere Books, 1982; Aventura Paperback, 1985) Shenfan William Hinton (785 pages, Random House, 1983; Vintage Paperback, 1984) The two books lumped together here have nothing in [...]
Phantasia is the realm of the imagination, the realm into which nothingness first erupts, and the beginning of philosophy. I The Unending Story by Michael Ende is both literally and in several other ways the most wonderful book I’ve read in ages. I think it will be easily received into the canon—hitherto almost exclusively English—of great [...]
Here’s a cause close to my heart: public and semi-public speech. I mean occasions when we are addressed by our political leaders on grand occasions of concern to the whole republic, and times, like the present, when we choose to come together to hear what someone invited to do so says about a matter of [...]
The ancient rhetoricians, who knew their business, taught that the way to begin a speech, the more so a breakfast talk, was with what they called a captatio benevolentiae, a “capturing of goodwill.” I’ll try that on you—I’ll try to snaffle your benevolence by claiming that we are likely to have this in common: a [...]