Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Aphorisms and Observations

  • Whisky

    Our most refined pleasures grow from the soil of conquered aversions.

  • Religion as a Drug

    Not all drugs are narcotics; some are stimulants. Philosophers of religion take note.

  • Troubled

    Troubled people are often trouble. Do you need more? Avoid the troubled, avoid trouble.

  • Eyes in the Mirror

    The eyes you see in the mirror when you look at yourself are not seeing eyes, but seen eyes. It is strange but true: your seeing eyes are and must remain invisible.

  • Mirror Meditation

    Neither admire the handsome face that looks back at you, nor be troubled by the inevitable signs of aging as the face gives way to a meatless, brainless skull.

  • The Psalms

    I find in the Psalms too much praising of a tribal god and not enough seeking of the hidden God. But both are there.

  • How Ambitious Ought One Be?

    Ambitious enough to secure the platform from which to reach beyond ambition.

  • Private Life

    Lost in her private life, she woke up one morning to find that the private life was no more.

  • Abdication of Authority

    Time was, when university faculty and administrators stood in loco parentis. Now their posture is supine while the students go loco.

  • Hyperbole

    Every word they write is a lie, and every syllable they speak. Their mendacity extends even unto the syntax of their sentences. Their periods prevaricate and their dashes dissemble.

  • Revolutionaries Honoring Revolutionaries

    To show honor and respect is a conservative practice. There is therefore something paradoxical about leftists erecting icons to iconoclasts. Or is there? Once in power, revolutionaries become conservative, conservative of their power, their unequal power.

  • The Harder I Work . . .

    . . . the more 'privileged' I become.

  • Truth and Consolation

    Nothing is true because it is consoling, but that does not preclude certain truths from being consoling.  So one cannot refute a position by showing that some derive consolation from it.  Equally, no support for a position is forthcoming from the fact that it thwarts our interests or dashes our hopes.

  • Moral Sickness

    Few are indifferent to their physical sickness, but most to their moral, if they are aware of it at all.

  • Where Less is More

    Alexander Pope advises that we drink deep of the Pierian spring, for a little learning is a dangerous thing. A little knowledge, like a little learning, is indeed a dangerous thing except in the case of persons, where a lot of knowledge endangers love, respect, and admiration. Propinquity breeds familiarity, and familiarity contempt. Distance preserves…