More specifically concerning: plato
19.11.01 – Monday
19 November 2001, around 15.58.
Softly, softly. Malthakôs. The oak leaves are falling at last — air of unreality, setting a scene (tho’ not making one). Received two glorious letters – read them in the afternoon light while waiting for the bus. Invariably waiting for the inevitable bus. There really is something about reading Plato. I can’t explain it. The […]
Elenchus
16 September 2002, around 13.35.
Socrates was married, you know, and his wife, Xanthippe, was a shrew. Perhaps that’s why he liked to sit in the cobbler’s shop and talk with young aristocrats about the meaning of words. ‘The only thing I know is that I don’t know anything.’ How many a man has said that, in the course of […]
Shoot the messenger
5 August 2003, around 8.07.
These characters, which now are wet and glossy, will become invisible when they are dried, being of the same colour as the substance on which We write. Such is the nature of this magic, that neither sweat nor water will affect it. —Don Tarquinio (xiii)
whistling Lillabullero
3 March 2021, around 5.07.
What on earth does this Socrates of yours mean?
punctuated equilibria
2 February 2022, around 9.06.
It is another round of desultory reading, a sort of weak waving of the hand at sturdy piles of thoughtful books that do not at the moment appeal. I’ve been in the sort of reading mood that cannot ignore failures of proofreading – the inconsistent use of straight and typographer’s quotation marks in the last […]
facta est lux
19 January 2023, around 4.26.
The supreme paradox of all thought is the attempt to discover something that thought cannot think. This passion is at bottom present in all thinking, even in the thinking of the individual, in so far as in thinking he participates in something transcending himself. But habit dulls our sensibilities, and prevents us from perceiving it. […]
procedural
11 August 2023, around 4.37.
…only a particular concatenation of circumstances will reveal that one man always acts in a good way because his instinctual inclinations compel him to, and the other is good only in so far and for so long as such cultural behaviour is advantageous for his own selfish purposes. But superficial acquaintance with an individual will […]
de monstra demonstranda
22 February 2024, around 11.26.
Medea, bad mommy extraordinaire, engaging in a bit of light witchcraft, illustration by Johann Wilhelm Baur to Ovid (ca. 1640s) The school of Criticism has made known in print its superiority to human feelings and the world, above which it sits enthroned in sublime solitude, with nothing but an occasional roar of sarcastic laughter from […]
okey-dokey
23 March 2024, around 12.40.
…the field is open to conjecture, so long as conjecture does not soar in the air but follows the true tracks that survive and is in keeping with the character of the times and the persons involved. —Jacob Burckhardt (The Age of Constantine the Great, trans. Moses Hadas, p. 237) One can spend a lot […]
the lot of the faint heart
22 April 2024, around 15.34.
“Ich glaube, daß er kein Automat ist” hat, so ohne weiteres, noch gar keinen Sinn. “I believe that he is not an automaton”, just like that, so far makes no sense. —Wittgenstein (Philosophy of Psychology – A Fragment, iv; trans. G.E.M. Anscombe et al.) An extract from Jean-Léon Gérôme’s ‘The Artist and His Model’ (1894) […]