The Good, therefore, is something that can never be properly known or understood by intellect because it is prior to the very conditions of intelligibility. This understanding of the Good has strong affinities with the apophatic traditions of many religions, and because of this, Platonic texts are often appropriated in this context to forward the …
We’re not living in the past but in the present, in the so-called metamodern world with its largely nihilistic sensibilities. This means our view of what happened long ago is filtered through our enwired and enworlded existence. To be properly traditional, I would say, requires seeing tradition less as something that happened, evident by some …
For humans, the path to unity with the prime mover was through nous: humans were to follow a single ethical direction with various adjustments made to remain on this path. Virtue was not obedience to abstract rules but following practical wisdom (phronesis) as led by the primer mover’s pull. Phronesis consequently was the motion between the primer mover and humans …
The eternalist–temporalist debate is ill-named. From this terminology, one would assume that the debate is between those who assert that God is eternal and those who assert that he is not. Most temporalists, however, do assert that God is eternal, they merely wish to dispute what this eternity is like. They maintain that God is …
As anyone who has learned to be cosmopolitan will object, the notion of an American scholar is antiquated. A false relic from a mythic past. For Emerson, the question was one brimming with possibility. But no longer for us. This is what those whom society deems wise—the academics, the activists, the thinktank psychiatrists, the intelligence …
As Aristotle observed, man is a political animal. In the limited cases of feral children (none of which have been truly and completely separated from the human community), we see the devastating effects that isolation has upon the individual. Such children fail to develop even the basic capacities characteristic of a proper human existence and …
“When one woman strikes at the heart of another, she seldom misses, and the wound is invariably fatal.” ― Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses In the novel Dangerous Liaisons, which shocked the French public with its depiction of the cruelty and degeneracy of the nobility, two aristocrats plot to corrupt a teenage girl who is …
Plato’s Republic teaches us that education of the young is not only about the mind; it needs also to be about the body as well. Modern society tends to dismiss much of Plato’s advice on education, asserting that such advice was needed for the world of Greek warring cities, not for large commercial nation-states.
So now we live in an aperspectival panopticon. There is no Benthamian authority watching us. There is no Big Brother. There is just us. Even big tech is just another name for the democratization of totalitarianism. Surveillance isn’t conducted from a lofty central point but from everywhere, through your eyes and mine. We’re alone, each …
Schelling invokes the creation of an aesthetic intuition to link both subjective and objective poles. Our consciousness becomes active and productive by Nature’s own unconscious power to affect us. This is Schelling’s romantic solution of synthesizing the conflict between the subjective and objective.
