At St. John’s I learned how to struggle with fate—before I was even capable of truly grasping what fate might possibly be—as I viewed what it meant to be human through the eyes of war-like Achilleus and as I wandered with crafty Odysseus, searching for my own city… On s’est trompé lorsqu’on a cru que [...]
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 [...]
Founded in 1696, St. John’s College has a unique history as one of America’s first, and leading, liberal arts institutions. St. John’s (campuses in Annapolis and Santa Fe) explores the great books of Western Civilization through seminar discussions. As Christopher Nelson (President, St. John’s College, Annapolis) has said: “Our books and our program demand more of us [...]
In the post-truth society, your facts are not my facts, and lies by political figures are greeted with indifference. Judged by past standards, citizens of a post-truth society have no real experience and no capacity for critical thinking. We Americans have virtually no interest in history; for us, the past pales in comparison with the [...]
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We want to give our students a classroom in which inciting books are talked about not as mere literature nor as historical documents, but boldly as they meant themselves to be taken: as the Word of God, or the insight of the intellect, or the wisdom of the world.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 [...]
Since American culture tells us that all individuals are equal and that we can recognize the truth just as well as the next person, we think that we have no need to seek guidance from others, even acknowledged masters. We Americans so firmly believe that each one of us has freely chosen our own way [...]
No animal except Homo sapiens has any choice in what life to live. Having a vastly richer interior life, we humans must struggle to find an excellent way of living, and we must recognize the most fundamental principle of human life: By nature every person is meant to love and be loved. I don’t know about [...]
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 [...]
Music assures us that we are not alone: that there is something out there in the world that knows our hearts and may even teach us to know them better. Thanks to music, we experience what it means to be connected to the whole of all things. “Music, too, is nature.” —Victor Zuckerkandl, Sound and [...]
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: [...]