Haven't been on in a good while, just due to both the difficulties and sometimes fullness of life. May everyone be doing very well! 'Still dealing with periodic flashbacks of the bad kind over here (thank-you Josée Bolduc), which still makes life more difficult than yea'd hope. Some steady improvement of a kind, at times, got juggered by some ( Read more... )

Greek philosophic term of the week: Eudaimonia (common trans: "happiness, bliss, blessedness"). Though commonly translated as happiness, eudaimonia has all the hallmarks of a symbolic expression  which became an idiom and eventually a stand-alone noun. The expression would have been transparent in its meaning back in a certain epoch, but certainly ( Read more... )

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Like modern democracies, the ancient Greek democracy had an anger problem. Read the historians, and you will see some things that are not remote: individuals litigating obsessively against people they blame for having wronged them; groups blaming other groups for their lack of power; citizens blaming prominent politicians and other elites for ( Read more... )

Shortly after the Revival of Learning in EuropeLet us begin and carry up this corpse ( Read more... )

“Equivalences of Experience and Symbolization in History” (1971)[1] is, in my view, one of Eric Voegelin’s five most important stand-alone essays, along with “Immortality: Experience and Symbol” (1967), “The Gospel and Culture” (1971), “The Beginning and the Beyond: A Meditation on Truth” (written 1974-77), and “Wisdom and the Magic of the Extreme ( Read more... )

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Greek philosophic term of the week:
Physis - “Nature”, from verb phynai (aorist pass. inf.), “to grow, to be begotten or born”. When we speak of Nature, we actually use the Latinized version of the Greek word physis, from which we also derive the word “physics”. As is happens, physis is one of the most important terms in Greek philosophy and ( Read more... )

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Plato’s Charmides is not one of the more famous dialogues or one often thought of as central, and it is not on the St. John’s reading list. The latter fact is probably irremediable; the former opinion is now, once and for all, remedied by Profound Ignorance.[1 ( Read more... )