Latest Posts

Escaping Advertisement:

The modern attention economy bombards us with constant ugly branding that creates a continuous and cacophanous daily aesthetic experience for most people. In this post, however, I argue that we can escape the tyranny of this ugliness with just a little thought and effort.

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Levels of Knowledge:

Continuing our series on the basics of Platonism, we must distinguish between two different kinds of knowledge that are appropriate to sensibles and intelligibles. The former, Plato calls doxa a kind of knowledge based on the way things seem. The latter Plato calls episteme, a kind of knowledge based on the timeless understanding of intelligible patterns.

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Alain Delon and the Beauty of Evil:

A few months ago, I went to a screening of Jean-Pierre Melville’s classic Le Samuraï (1967), staring a young Alain Delon. No one could have known at the time of the screening that Delon would pass away just a few weeks later on the 18th of August at the age of 88. Since then, I have watched several of his films, and collectively they trouble my soul with many questions about the relationship between evil and beauty. It’s beginning to disturb my Platonic sleep.

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Notebook

If you would like to browse past essays from the Notebook, you can see the big chronological list in the Archive or you can browse through the list of Tags. In this notebook you can read my attempts to work out my ideas in a public space before they make it into the longer and more polished Essays.