I’ve tried, now and then, to read Aristotle for pleasure. I would get the odd, frustrated feeling that there really ought to have been something pleasurable going on, but that some magical thread essential to the activity of reading was consistently eluding me. Well, I’m trying to read the Nicomachean Ethics again. And this time [...]
Archive for the ‘greek’ Category
the echoing wisdom of the teacher’s teacher’s teacher
Posted in Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, beginnings, books, good, greek on October 29, 2009 | 5 Comments »
My Aim
Posted in God, Socrates, anyone, beginnings, books, conjunctions, cosmos, dialogue, greek, history, language, logic, love? on April 3, 2009 | 1 Comment »
In his beautiful reflection on the Catholic Intellectual Tradition given at Regensburg Pope Benedict affirms the “profound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the word and the Biblical understanding of faith in God.” He points to this “profound harmony” at work in the beginning of John’s Gospel. “In the beginning [...]
The Voice of the Athenian: the city begins where the city ends, part ii
Posted in Socrates, anyone, athens, beginnings, defeat, dialogue, eccentric, exceptions, fate, greek, history, love?, melos, polis, the impossible, tragedy on March 17, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
I wanted to give my post below as an example of the scenario I was trying (and failing) to articulate last fall. In this scenario, the failure of a speaker’s effort – an effort that up to this point seems determine the meaning of a conversation relative to a certain goal of longed-for persuasion or [...]
another angle on cosmos
Posted in Equality, Geometry, God, Socrates, Sophistry, anyone, athens, beginnings, cosmos, dialogue, eccentric, greek, hubris, idiosyncrasy, love?, necessity, polis, wisdom on March 12, 2009 | 3 Comments »
At the tail end of prosecuting his interlocutor Callicles, who has scorned his offer of friendship, balked at his refutations, and threatened him with murder, Socrates withdraws for a moment from the struggle of argument, having won something like the moment of calm perception that an exhausted warrior receives beside the ongoing fray, seeing the [...]
Vivant Dr. Sampo, Dr. Mumbach, Miss Bonifield, Mr. Shea, Miss Enos, and the others! — Semper Sint in Flore
Posted in Indian Summer, Janus, annihilation, anyone, art, athens, autumn, beginnings, bells, books, crannies, cry, defeat, dialogue, eccentric, exceptions, fate, flowers, greek, history, hubris, idiosyncrasy, language, letters, love?, mania, melos, mosaic, necessity, nemesis, nooks, polis, rain, rule, spring, stars, summer, the fall, the impossible, time, tragedy, wind, winter, wisdom, wit on February 24, 2009 | 1 Comment »
What Is Catholic About a College Degree
Peter V. Sampo
President, Thomas More College
Let us assume the college has a Catholic liturgy, teaches Orthodox Catholic theology, and is under the auspices of a religious order, a diocese, or is, at least, canonically recognized by a diocese. Further, let us assume loyalty to the Magisterium. As necessary as [...]
something I wrote for my Lucretius class
Posted in Aphrodite, God, Homer, Lucretius, Venus, anyone, beginnings, conjunctions, fate, greek, history, ladies, language, latin, love?, sailing, sun, traffic, voluptas, water, wind on February 9, 2009 | 1 Comment »
y calling Venus “Aeneadae genetrix” Lucretius both accepts a mythic inheritance and returns it to his reader strangely transformed. The phrase focuses our attention on the overwhelming nearness of Aphrodite to Anchises that produced Aeneas, and seeks to extend the brilliance and force of that strange and momentary relationship of the human and divine – “hominum divumque voluptas” – over the begetting of each of the Aeneadae. But, by an odd sort of logic, the poet’s extending her particular role in the birth of Aeneas over the births of men in general, Venus herself, the brilliant, dissembling, shame-faced goddess who shines in the Homeric hymn is allowed to recede farther from our sphere. The intimacy of Aphrodite’s union with Anchises is evoked mutedly here only to release her from it into the more general and metaphorical motherhood that befits the respectful distance Lucretius grants the gods. By “pluralizing” this union, this highest pleasure of men and gods – “hominum divumque,” Lucretius prepares us to let that “and” assume a more disjunctive and subdued force, in contrast to the conjoining violence at the meeting-point of gods and men which is the center of the Homeric cosmos.
speech ending quietly
Posted in God, athens, beginnings, dialogue, greek, language, love?, mania, rule, summer, wind, wisdom on November 17, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Phaedrus: . . . But let’s be going, since now even the stifling heat is more gentle.
Socrates: Shouldn’t we pray to the gods here before going?
Phaedrus: Yes, surely.
Socrates: Dear Pan and ye other gods who dwell here, grant that I may become beautiful within and that my worldly belongings be in accord with my inner [...]
The Voice of the Melian: the City Begins where the City Ends, Part I
Posted in athens, beginnings, greek, history, language, love?, melos, nemesis, polis, stars, the impossible, thucydides, tragedy on November 6, 2008 | 8 Comments »
In the latest comments on “Remember Melos”, itself a comment on a dialogue to which comment can only be late, Finny tries to read the voices of Athens and Melos. This reading begs the question: where is it that these voices can be heard? In what forum, what agora, what city can Athens and Melos have anything to say to each other? What assembly, and what sort [...]
the odour of the lamp
Posted in Abraham, Achilles, God, Moby Dick, albatross, art, greek, history, language, latin, mosaic, polis, sailing, savage, skrim-shander, the impossible, water, whale, whiteness, wind, winter on November 2, 2008 | 2 Comments »
Through the rambling body of any grand or would-be-grand endeavour, poetry, life, and all their bewildered exchanges, it is always in a back-alley, a digression, an out of the way place that unity, kosmos insinuates itself.
Moby Dick, a book not inaptly compared for fantastic uncontainability to a labyrinth through a thundercloud, harbors any number of such out of the way places that promise a truer scope of its impossible whole than passages [...]
An Aristophanic Impossibility
Posted in Archimedes, Hermes, Janus, Syracuse, annihilation, art, athens, beginnings, catapult, economy cars, fate, greek, hubris, love?, mania, mosaic, necessity, nemesis, pretentious, rain, speed, stars, summer, sun, the dramatic unities of time and place, the impossible, traffic on October 26, 2008 | 2 Comments »
I am insane. I no longer doubt it. Allow me to convince you. This morning I found myself desperately trying to put milk in cereal instead of cereal in milk. Always with the same result: my cereal ended up in the milk, and not the other way round. I’d gone through three boxes of Grandy O’s and two [...]
