The Closing of the American Mind, by Allan Bloom. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987) Here is a book which compels the question whether we should be glad of its existence. My answer is that we should be thrice glad, glad once that it was written, and glad that, having been produced, it found such [...]
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/partiallyexaminedlife/PEL_ep_079_6-22-13.mp3 In the above podcast, Eva Brann discusses her book The Logos of Heraclitus (2011). What is the world like, and how can we understand it? Heraclitus thinks that the answer to both questions is found in "the logos," which is a Greek word with multiple meanings: it can be an explanation, a word [...]
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 [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]