Here is a theory of time. It is neither new to me nor new in the world. I formulated it for publication in 1999 and had it formulated for me, so I could make it my own, sixteen hundred years ago by Augustine in 399 A.D. and some three quarters of a millennium before that [...]
Now that school is back in session, I will shortly be resuming a study group that began last year on Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. I thought I might say just two things here about the particular excellence of this great book—that it fuses history and philosophy, and that it promotes the [...]
The Tenants of Time, by Thomas Flanagan. (New York: Dutton, 1988). Here is a book that lives up to its captivating title. For its perspective on human events is that from which time is most apt to seem like a place, and a place—here Ireland—seem like a temporal being. It is the perspective of history. [...]
The aim of liberal education is to help people become free. It tries to educate people who are free to search out knowledge on their own, people who are not dependent on others to tell them what they need to know, and ultimately, people who are the best judges of their own needs. It tries [...]
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 [...]
Liberal education has as its end the free mind, and the free mind must be its own teacher. Stringfellow Barr & Scott Buchanan I have some questions I want to ask you, questions for St. John’s graduates and questions for American citizens. As I understand the questions, one leads to another, and they [...]
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 [...]