Extended meditations where ideas unfold slowly, critically, and without concession to fashion.
Following the classical literature, we could say that liberal education differentiates a free man from a slave (passions). The full understanding of the meaning of liberal education can be found, for example, in the literature of Plato (The Laws and The Republic), Aristotle (Politics), and Xenophon (Education of Cyrus), as stated precisely in a passage …
On the other hand, if metaphysics is the discipline of reality itself, then the individual’s metaphysical formation will influence his well-being and contribute to weaving the web of metaphysical constructs around him into a focus of authenticity and freedom from the neurotic anxieties of concerted reality. The world will be in free fall, but in …
Ryan Gosling’s role in this new chapter of the sigma mythology is not minor, as he embraces yet another aspect of contemporary male struggle and makes it into a fine performance, showing how male identity struggles for female love and attention and how that natural momentum, at one point used to get the female gaze, …
It’s hard to explain what I saw. I love a film that does not follow the cliche of what it’s supposed to do. In the same way, I love a “novel” that tries to be anything but it. You can’t dance while you see Merzbow perform live. But you can rock your head and thrash …
To know what this means, to know what this feels like, walk into a dark room and, if you’re not stuck in a phase of rolling blackouts as I often am here in South Africa, flick that light switch. Day erupts inside a room, and night is chased into its various corners. The entire environment …
The Socratic method seeks to question conventional wisdom to transcend it and thus arrive at a true understanding. Denying one hypothesis does not necessarily mean its counter-hypothesis is true. In this sense, the Socratic method can lead us to the conclusion that an idea is not true, and in that case, it would make us …
While paling in comparison to the achievement of that final goal and worthless without it, the refinement of a cultured life is nevertheless a worthy pursuit. Ideally, as we see so compellingly illustrated in Newman’s own life, the refinement of culture serves as a kind of superadded halo around the halo of holiness, a fringe …
While courtly love was mostly a literary genre exploited by troubadours and poets such as Dante, in practice, it may have been very well been an actual phenomenon, or at least a cultural aspect strong enough to survive in chivalric traditions still extant to our days, most particularly in England, where the Order of the …
According to Zeland, the essence of a pendulum could be summed up in the phrase, “Stop doing what you are doing and, instead, do what I do.” This is very obvious in the case of advertisement and spiritual preaching, but what about more subtle scenarios?
“Without genuine, deep inwardness, we cannot take a stand against the inauthenticity of the world. Fighting noise with more noise will not do. In doing so, inevitably, the crowd becomes the measure, just as political chatter so easily becomes the content of our thinking.”
