Tag: Philosophy
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2024-09-13
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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2024-09-06
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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2024-08-16
Being and Becoming
We continue our series on the fundamentals of Platonism by explaining how intelligibles are "beings" that simply are what they are while sensibles are "becomings" that unroll what they are over time.
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2024-06-21
Eidos in the Meno and Euthyphro
Continuing our series of essays introducing basic ideas in Platonism, this week we take a close look at several critical passages from the early dialogues Meno and Euthyphro that use the vocabulary of "eidos" and "idea."
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2024-06-14
The Language of the Forms
Confusion sometimes surrounds the technical terms that are used in the Platonic tradition to refer to the Forms because there is not just one word for 'form' but several. To make matters worse, none of the relevant words were originally conceived as technical terms and Plato himself uses them only sparingly. In this essay, I hope to clarify the situation.
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2024-06-07
Sensibles and Intelligibles
Expanding on the last essay, this post adds some nuance to the distinction between sensibles and intelligibles and introduces some of the words that are used in Greek as technical vocabulary in the Platonic tradition.
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2024-06-01
The Mystery of Similarity
Despite the grand, cosmic conclusions, Platonism begins from very simple, ordinary observations. Among these ordinary mysteries---and leading straight to the heart of Platonism---the common experience of similarity is perhaps the most strange of all.
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2024-05-18
Plato's Academy
A brief introduction to Plato's Academy, the school Plato founded outside of Athens and which continued after him for two-and-half centuries.
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2024-05-10
Tell Me What to Want
Whenever I become frustrated or unhappy with my life I go hunting. This kind of hunting brings me no solace at all, but I don't know how to stop. The trouble is that I don't really know what I want, I desperately want to know what I want, and there are numerous services offering to solve this trouble for me by promising a variety of visions so compelling that I will finally know what I want whenever I reach the bottom of the feed.
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2024-05-03
Avoidance and Consumption
What do you do when you don't know what to do? Or when you know what to do but don't especially want to do it? I know what I do. I just consume. In the moment, it feels like I'm clicking in order to chase something, but underneath I know that I'm clicking in order to run away.
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2024-04-26
How to Read Difficult Texts, Part 2
Last week, I recommended that students should approach difficult texts by slowing down, reading sentence by sentence, and refusing to move on before they have thoroughly understood what has been said. At other times, the very best way to start understanding something is to immerse yourself in a huge flood of it. This is common advice for foreign languages. Just expose your mind to large volumes of the desired language without bothering to understand each and every word.
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2023-09-22
The Freedom of the Artist
In the last two posts, we explored two ways of thinking about freedom that I have argued are ultimately inadequate. In this post, I will articulate a third option that I believe preserves the best intuitions in these two models while avoiding their inadequacies. This third option conceives of freedom on analogy with an artist's act of creation.
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2023-09-16
The Freedom of the Übermensch
Echoing the sentiments of some sophists contemporary with Socrates, Nietzsche articulates a thoroughly constructivist (and therefore dismissive) account of conventional values. We have the capacity, by our own acts of esteeming not simply to select from objectively given options, but to create the very options and the terms in which we value them.
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2023-09-08
Freedom in the Myth of Er
In Plato's famous Myth of Er, we find a memorable image that becomes a major source of inspiration for Western thinking about freedom. In this post I argue that it encourages us to think about freedom as a kind of selection from objectively given alternatives, and that this is ultimately misleading.
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2023-09-01
Introduction to Hildebrand - Value
Hildebrand is well known for his philosophy of value and value-response, which grounds many of his most important philosophical insights and appears in nearly all his works. Value, according to Hildebrand, is a basic datum of experience appearing as the "important in itself" as distinct from the "merely subjectively satisfying" and the "objective good for the person." The encounter with this excellence presents itself as something more than merely neutral, something that demands a kind of respect even though it may not hold any element of subjective pleasure for me or involve a benefit to me at all.
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2023-08-25
The Virtue of Orderliness
Orderliness is the first of the cultured virtues because the development of all the others presupposes an orderly way of life. The disorderly person might strike upon something, from time to time, that looks like elegance or intelligence, but such happy coincidence does not proceed from virtue because it does not proceed from deliberate cultivation.
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2023-07-21
Focus on the Smaller Scale
Analysts and pundits lavish a disproportionate amount of attention on Society, always intoned with a capital S. This causes us to lose sight of the smaller forms of association that play a much larger role in our real lived experience. We go to schools, we work at jobs, and we come home to families where we hope to find some measure of belonging. The degree of impact that my place of work has upon me as an individual is thousands of times larger than the impact that Society has upon me as an abstract totality.
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2023-06-16
Teaching Virtue
We all want our children to become virtuous, so we naturally shop around for the schools and communities that have the best results. Upon inspection, however, we find that the graduating classes at even the best schools are not infallibly filled with saints. Parents eventually complain. Teachers complain too.
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2023-06-09
Personhood, Personal Identity, and Personality
It is helpful to draw a distinction between three things. Persons are persons just by their mode of existence, even as an embryo or in a coma. This is constituted by their personhood, which is the same for all persons. Personal identity, however, distinguishes one person from another and establishes that person as the same person over time. This personal identity is a stable possession, but it can develop a person's capacities into the full expression of a personality.
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2023-05-26
Constrained Goods
Sometimes we cherish things that we would not wish upon our own children. Isn't this a puzzle? If such things are so good, why would we strive to eliminate the conditions that make them possible? I propose a basic distinction between constrained goods and liberal goods that will help to solve the puzzle.
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2023-05-19
Vulcans and Androids
Science fiction has made popular a certain trope concerning us logicians. The thought is that logic is somehow cold and calculating, the activity of a merely robotic kind of intelligence. Students sometimes assume that this is the point of logic class. Emotions get you into trouble, so your parents want you to be more like Spock. The unfortunate side-effect of the treatment is that you will be less fun at parties. In defense of logicians everywhere, especially those passionate, very-fun-at-parties, Platonic logicians, I submit that this stereotype misses a deep truth about the nature of the human soul.
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2023-05-12
The Socrates Effect
A curious thing happens when a young man meets Socrates for the first time. To a young man, the humiliation of successful men in the previous generation holds a perennial fascination. They gathered around. They enjoyed the spectacle. They imitated the method. A few of them listened and understood.
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2023-04-21
The Abdication of Ethics
Self-help literature has come to fill the void left in contemporary ethics by the abdication of wisdom. Ancient ethics concerned itself with providing real guidance toward living a good life. Modern ethics concerns itself with large-scale social questions or abstract thought-experiments. The result is that people turn to self-improvement literature for concrete guidance, a genre that studiously avoids broaching the hard questions.
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2023-04-14
The Logic of the World
The study of logic is the study of that which makes sense, the study of those structures that necessarily must be for things to hang together without contradiction. The Greeks called the intelligible structure of something its "logos," and this is where we get our word. These necessary structures, these "logoi," are not things that we make up in our heads or record in our books. They are all around us, everywhere, the basic fabric of the world we inhabit.
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2023-04-07
The Cost of Beauty
With an excess of wealth, one can afford the uselessness of finer things. It helps that this uselessness signals to everyone else just how much you can afford. Rich or poor, however, there is one splendid reality that confronts us all every single day and gives the lie to the idea that beautiful things must be expensive. Every morning the sky shows its face, smiling simply in bright blues or flirting coyly in wisps of white. Sometimes it downright sulks in gloomy greys, or blasts its anger in overwhelming tempest blacks.
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2023-03-31
Gratitude
Every morning, I write my gratitude. Lest I offend my disgruntled waking eyes, only one small desk lamp illumines the leather chair in my office. I begin by writing the date in Shaeffer red with a fountain pen that I have dedicated to this color. Then I write at least one paragraph in sepia, beginning with the words "I am grateful for..."
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2023-03-24
In Defense of the Non-Moral
Of course we aim at virtue, and of course the pursuit of virtue should take pride of place in everything we do. But the truth is that we should also educate our children in non-moral excellencies that are intrinsically valuable and choiceworthy for their own sake. It is simply a beautiful thing to learn history well whether or not it makes you a better person morally.
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2023-03-10
The Comforts of Misanthropy
My pessimism makes me hopeful. Human beings---myself very much among them---cause me so much dismay, with their perpetual stupidity, immorality, incompetence, incivility, and philistinism, that I am inclined to judge the present shambles of our society to be rather good in the grand scheme of things.
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2023-03-03
Asceticisms
The whole ethos of asceticism, with its valorization of difficulty, can obscure the radically different motives for which ascetic practices might be adopted, and in the literature of these religious orders, one sometimes meets with a rhetorical excess, which, if we are not careful, threatens to undermine the philosophical foundations of our most basic thinking about goodness.
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2023-02-24
Wrong-Headed Charity
Christians sometimes think—or talk as though—any glorification of excellence signals a hostility toward everyone who has failed to achieve it, that genuine love for the least of these requires the denigration of excellence. The only issue with this line of thinking is its utter incoherence. The very idea of charity presupposes the goodness of that which is given and the badness of the recipient's condition.
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2023-02-17
False Humility
A man who looks for excellence, it is thought, must surely be both proud and judgmental. In some circles, one gets the impression that the good news of the Gospel is that human beings will always and forever be terrible at everything they do, so we can all breathe a sigh of relief and stop trying. If some trouble-maker comes in and suggests that we can do better at this or that, such exhortation is interpreted as a case of 'human striving.'
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2023-02-10
Self-Acceptance
It is no surprise that a whole self-help industry has sprung up centered around the notion that we have no real inadequacies or failures: You are perfect and beautiful just the way you are. After all, there is a large, highly-motivated, paying audience who desperately wants just this message.
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2023-02-03
Inclusivity
No one likes to be left out of the club, but every club can only exist by making a distinction between those who are members and those who are not. If everyone is part of the club, then there is no club.
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2023-01-27
Egalitarianism
All discussion of excellence rests on a rejection of universal unqualified egalitarianism. Excellence in any field requires a scale of better and worse, and this scale of better and worse rests on the inequality of whatever things are on that scale.
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2023-01-20
Individual Relativism
Individual relativism can often come from both conflict avoidance and antipathy toward authority. We should acknowledge that both of these emotional reactions do give us some insights into the truth, but they do not give us any reason to think that excellence is not objective.
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2023-01-13
Cultural Relativism
Apart from the cheap points we can score by pointing out the internal contradictions of cultural relativism, a much deeper critique can be leveled against the assumption that there is widespread cultural disagreement about core values.
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2023-01-06
Luxury Beliefs
Enemies of Excellence Part 2. Luxury beliefs are those beliefs that one can only afford to hold once sufficient material and cultural wealth guarantees that the implications of those beliefs need never be faced.
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2022-12-30
Enemies of Excellence - Intro
Introduction to the Enemies of Excellence series of posts. What are the mindsets that hold us back from excellence or from valuing a philosophy of excellence? Where do they come from and why do they sometimes have such a visceral force behind them?
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2022-12-09
Cynicism
Why the spirit of cynicism haunts the internet and how to exorcise it.
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2022-12-02
In Praise of Pretension
We should not use 'pretentious' as a sneering word. One must, after all, pretend to be something before becoming it. That's how aspiration works.
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2022-09-01
Scientism and Ancient Philosophy
Ancient philosophical approaches have an advantage over modern, reductive approaches, because the ancient approach can absorb whatever insights are true in modern mechanistic explanations, while dogmatic reductionism cannot absorb the spiritual insights of ancient thought.
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2022-08-30
Science and Scientism
Scientism is not science. Scientism is a questionable philosophy that misunderstands the methodological bracketing of science.
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2022-08-24
Bayesian Reasoning
Bayesian reasoning often shows us that the likelihood of something being true given our evidence is lower than we think. In this post, however, I examine what happens when we have multiple lines of converging evidence, which often turns out to raise the probability higher than we might guess.
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2022-03-11
Leisure
I appear on the Classical Etc. podcast to discuss the concept of leisure.
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2022-02-28
Dust Jacket 2: Nagel
In Session 2 of the Dust Jacket podcast, Martin Cothran and I discuss Thomas Nagel's *Mind and Cosmos*.
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2021-12-20
Modernism
I do not want to disown all the good things that come with the modern world, and I don't think that we can turn back the clock. What I want to resist is not modernity but modernism.
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2021-12-11
A Dialogue on Platonic Realism
I had an interesting conversation with a friend on Discord about Platonic realism. So we decided to dress it up as a Platonic dialogue.
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2020-10-14
Logos as Intelligibility and Intelligence Video
New video based on the previous blog post discussing the objective side of logos, intelligibility, and the subjective side, intelligence.
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2020-07-10
Logos as Intelligibility and Intelligence
We continue to explore the meaning of the word Logos by distinguishing the objective side, intelligibility, from the subjective side, intelligence. The latter is a faculty receptive to the former.
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2020-07-05
Cosmos and Logos Video
Here is the video based on the last blog post.
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2020-07-02
Cosmos and Logos
In this post I explore the interesting interplay between the concepts of Logos and Cosmos. A Cosmos is an ordered arrangement of elements, which requires a source or cause for this order. Hence, Logos can be understood as the principle of organization for any Cosmos.
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2020-04-08
Different Meanings of Substance
We should hold carefully apart two meanings of the philosophical term substance. (i) the essence or whatness of a thing and (ii) the real distinct subsistence of a thing.
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2020-01-23
Jordan Peterson and Platonic Realism
Jordan Peterson's use of Jungian archetypes brings him close to the kind of metaphysical realism we see in Christian Platonism---close, but not quite there.
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2019-12-10
Religious Experience and Brain Activity
Even if we could establish a tight connection between religious experience and activity in a certain region of the brain, this would not prove religious experience to be illusory.
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2019-12-03
Guilt by Association
We should not judge philosophical ideas or practices based on a surface similarity to unchristian systems of thought. Rather we should look out for substantive corruptions to the truth.
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2019-10-09
Traditionalism
Traditionalism is best understood as an orientation toward the timeless truth rather than an attachment to old ideas simply because they are old.
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2019-09-04
Two Personalisms
We must distinguish the "Christian personalist" movement from what some philosophers call "theistic personalism" in contrast to "classical theism."
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2019-07-24
What are the Forms?
Following the last post on the meaning of Platonism, I here flesh out the idea of transcendent Forms as intelligible structures that keep showing up again and again in the world of our experience.
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2019-06-27
What I Mean by Platonism
Platonism has come to mean different things to different scholars. When I call myself a Platonist, I mean that I believe in the Forms, that I believe in real, eternal, immaterial, intelligible structures beyond the world of sense.
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2019-06-10
Conservatism and Ideology
Ideologies are overly simplistic views of the world, which support themselves through slogans. While slogans may be practically indispensable in a democracy, conservatism is something more.
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2019-06-04
Know Thyself
The Christian notion of self-knowledge is a long way off from New Age self-realization and not quite the same as the pagan Greek original either.
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2019-05-30
Eros Comes from Beauty Beheld
I often encounter Christians who feel guilty because they seem to lack a certain fire or zeal in their pursuit of what they know to be true. I argue they can remedy this by recognizing a link between the psychology of eros and the time they spend imaginatively beholding the beauty of God.
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2019-05-28
Apparently Anselm is Convincing
Teaching Anselm recently, I discovered that many of my students found the ontological argument very convincing. I think this has to do with the way older authors are presented.
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2018-06-11
No Such Thing As Subjective Truth
Just some casual reflections that I had after a friendly discussion resulted in my arguing that "subjective truth" was an oxymoron.
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2017-11-23
The Logos and Jordan Peterson
Reflection on the difference between my own understanding of the logos and Jordan Petersons.