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.
Wisdom involves two elements: (i) gaining insight into the way of things, that is, the objective structure of reality or what the Greeks would call the Logos, and (ii) learning to shape our lives in conformity with this objective order.
During the Medieval period in which they were first organized, the universities such as Oxford operated as kingdoms unto themselves, the intellectual work associated with the vita contemplativa occurring in isolation behind cloistered walls that exempted the monkish scholars from the practical exigencies of the town’s daily life.
If the novelist, philosopher and critic, Colin Wilson is remembered at all it is as one of the ‘Angry Young Men,’ and for his first book, ‘The Outsider,’ (1956) ‘the definitive study of alienation, creativity, and the modern mind,’ as it is described on the front cover of the Victor Gollancz paperback that lies on …
Much of Boethius' work The Consolation of Philosophy speaks of luck, or Fortuna. However, as The Consolation of Philosophy continues, the reader is brought to Boethius' inevitable conclusion. That it is self-examination that provides humans with lasting happiness. The Consolation of Philosophy is not necessarily a Christian work or just about suffering but, instead, the power …
