Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Aphorisms and Observations

  • Do Great Minds Think Alike?

    Sometimes. But it doesn't follow that minds who think alike are great.

  • Choice of Model

    Take no one man as your model; take many in the drafting and crafting of your inimitable self.

  • ‘Pastime’

    Whatever we are here for, we are not here to pass time. Our time is to be used and used well. You say it doesn't matter how we spend our time since nothing matters? That may or may not be so.  But it matters which.  If something does matter and you live as if nothing…

  • The Philosopher

    A philosopher is one sensitive to the strangeness of the ordinary, and open to the puzzles hidden in platitudes. 

  • I don’t live by the sword . . .

    . . . but I aim not to die by one either; so I need a sword.

  • The Lion and the Lamb

    Perhaps someday the lion will lie down with the lamb. Should that day come, I would still prefer to be the lion. (To repackage a remark I heard Tom Cotton make last night.)  

  • Agapic Love

    It is rare are among humans, but common in relation to our pets.

  • The Moral Horror of Murder

    One man takes from another what neither can give: life.   It is passing strange that leftists do not share with us this moral horror, as witness their casual attitude toward even the most vicious modes of criminality. 

  • List and Precision Obsession

    You are list-obsessive if you write down an already completed task just so you can cross it off your list. You are precision-obsessive if you point out that a task, completed or not, is not the sort of thing that can be crossed off a list. An admirable concern for precision can veer off into…

  • Sorry Gottlob, Sorry Bertrand

    Attributes are at the things to which they are attributed. Existence, then, is in a broad sense  an attribute of existing items despite adding nothing to the quiddity of the thing to which it is attributed apart from its capacity to have a quiddity.

  • Homo Faber

    Man is homo faber. Among the things he makes: fake certainties.

  • Spiritual Myopia

    Our eyes on the distant, we become far-sighted; our fingers clutching the paltry, petty and myopic.

  • Lunar Virtue

    The Moon shares what she has received with all, not fully, but in phases. She waxes and she wanes, but regularity rules her diversity.

  • Solar Virtue

    The Sun sheds his light on all and sundry and from none does he expect a return.

  • The Mother Tongue

    The wings of thought need a tongue to bring to earth their lofty load. Honor thy Mother!